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Mysterious Dark Matter Blob Confounds Experts
mayberry42 writes "Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope are mystified by a merging galaxy cluster known as Abell 520 in which concentrations of visible matter and dark matter have apparently come unglued. A report on the Hubble observations, published in the Astrophysical Journal, raises more questions than answers about a cosmic pile-up that's occurring 2.4 billion light-years away. 'According to our current theory,' says Arif Babul, the study team's senior theorist, 'galaxies and dark matter are expected to stay together, even through a collision. But that's not what's happening in Abell 520. Here, the dark matter appears to have pooled to form the dark core, but most of the associated galaxies seem to have moved on.'"
What the heck? I thought part of the definition is that we can *not* directly observe Dark Matter?
WTF?
I'm pretty sure this headline is about my recent visit from the plumber.
Has anyone seen that confounded bridge?
Also, FIRST!
The galaxies are gone. Horse has already left the barn. Spilled milk. Water under the bridge.
Dark matter needs to buck up, get it together, and move on, get on with the life. There is a whole universe out there.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
From my understanding of dark matter, isn't it likely yhat they're looking at two entirely different types of matter? I thought dark matter was just matter that we can't "see" but can detect due to it's gravitational effect on visible light. So why would it be so far fetched to think there's more than one type of matter in the universe that we can't currently directly observe?
I've seen this before.
We are all DOOMED!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Must be a cosmic pile-up of tribbles.
Awoken the Grue has been.
You can't handle the truth.
Make sure to call me if that blob starts moving towards earth!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If Abell 520 has had the DM 'stripped from its galaxies' (from the link) and since DM was originally postulated to explain the difference between theoretical and observed rotation rates of the core and periphery of galaxies... shouldnt the galaxies of Abell 520, stipped of their DM, now be rotating in accordance with the original theory? That is to say, if gravitational theory predicts that, sans DM, the cores of galaxies will rotate more quicky than the periphery, and these galaxies are now 'sans DM', wouldnt that open the opportunity to provide falsification or support to the DM hypothesis by checking if the galaxies of Abell 520 are indeed rotating differently now that the DM has been removed?
When we get to look more closely, we'll see it's a convention of elephants and tortoises.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Obviously, the Death Star detritus, along with the burntout hulks of various starships blown out of existence by Luke and Hans and that furr-faced fellow, had to congregate someplace........
The theories existing now are obviously wrong. Scientists, especially cosmologist these days are always puzzled, perplexed, surprised, mystified and confounded by the unexpected data that does not fit into any of their theories. There are theories that other people have come up with that don't require dark matter, dark energy, black holes and other convoluted mathematical constructs that have never been observed in real life. Maybe it is time to throw out the old theories and consider some of these theories, which up till now have been dismissed as crackpot ideas. Maybe some of those alternate theories that have been labeled “crackpot” need to be looked at more seriously in light of the flood of data confounding, perplexing and fooling current mainstream scientists.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
FTS: A report...published in the Astrophysical Journal, raises more questions than answers about a cosmic pile-up that's occurring 2.4 billion light-years away.
Should that be "occured 2.4 billion years ago"?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If it gets you you'd best jump into a pressure chamber, it's you only hope.
God?
Seems to fit:
- provides structure
- omnipresent
It's going to really bum some people out if this turns out to be true...
Maybe looking for the "god"-particle is less of a cliche than we think..
Just sayin......
Maybe they pointed the Hubbel at Rush Limbaugh
Mysterious Dark Matter Blob Confounds Experts
My ex-wife confounds me too.
Silence is a state of mime.
I see the experts were Confounded.
Does anybody know if they were also Baffled, or Stumped? It would also be good to know if they were also left Scratching Their Heads?
Oh yeah, were they Dumbfounded too?
"We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture." Hannes Alfven.
The default position for scientists is "I don't know"
everything else is trying to define and explain
this is why nothing is set as a certainty but always as a theory
a Theory (theory of gravity, theory of climate change etc.) is usually the best most simple hypothesis that explains experimentally verifiable data.
you can create any theory you want from the incredibly convoluted to the overly simplistic (because god made it so strikes me as an overly simplistic theorem).
Usually the simplest (but not most simplistic) theory will be the one that gains the most credence in the scientific community.
the KISS rule applies very much in science too.
da da da dum indeed.
It must be cold sweat left behind by two fighting galaxies.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Things that probably don't even exist anymore?
Likewise, an alien species looking at Earth is probably seeing a bunch of dinosaurs, and we all know how THAT turned out.
God?
We'll have to revise the Sistene Chapel ceiling, for one thing.
Have gnu, will travel.
This should not be too confounding. Suppose you have two galaxies collide. The dark matter will sail right through the other galaxy, affected only by the overall gravity. The stars will almost never hit each other, so the vast majority of them will be affected only by the overall gravity too. The gas and dust will not - dust is subject to radiation pressure, and gas (plasma) magnetic fields. Once the gas and the dark matter become separated, there is no guarantee they will ever get back together. As the paper says :
One of the key tools for studying merging clusters is the comparison among the distributions of the three cluster constituents: galaxies, hot plasma, and dark matter. For example, in merging clusters the intracluster medium suffers from ram pressure and lags behind galaxies and dark matter, which are believed to be effectively collisionless. The contrast between collisional and collisionless components becomes highest when we observe merging clusters at their core pass-through, when both the medium velocity and the effect of ram pressure stripping are largest.
Wish I had mod points this evening. I can't wait to drop this word into a conversation!
>2012
>Still using Hubble
>Costanza_smirking.jpg
In all seriousness, I am impressed this thing is still working. I would have thought it was retired by now. Way to go, Nasa!
We have observed dark matter. The moon is dark matter, the asteroids are dark matter, etc. The galaxies are filled with all sorts of rocky trash and dead stars. We can barely see the asteroids in our own solar system with telescopes, do you really think we can observe in any way the rocks zillions of miles away in other galaxies????
Think about it.
Antimatter caused the visible/dark matter to come unglued.
It dragged them down unnecessarily and nobody figured any way to use it for anything so they schemed a plot to leave it behind.
I was the real korpiq until I woke up clowned.
They call it dark matter but I call it a mathematical error. That makes the whole situation make A LOT more sense than made-up physics of made up materials actually.
"Dark matter" isn't simply regular matter/particles that we just can't see due to not emitting light. We may not know quite what it is, but we have a pretty good idea about what it is not, and that's regular matter as we know it.
God?
Seems to fit:
- provides structure
- omnipresent
- never seen them both at the same party
I think you're onto something! (Or maybe just on something?)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Could it be that the universe's entire playing field is just stuffed with warped areas here and there for no reason other than that there's no reason it should be smooth either, and galaxies form and move around these areas? I suppose if those underlying distortions themselves can move around then whether it's a form of matter or not might be moot. Any astrophysicists care to explain?
Time to invent subspace, as there is clearly nothing there :)
So God is universal, omnipresent, and doesn't interact directly with people at all.
Sounds like the Unitarian-Universalists were right !
So God is universal, omnipresent, and doesn't interact directly with people at all.
Sounds like the Unitarian-Universalists were right !
Only some of them. Others are not sure of versions of godhood that are entirely different.
Actually, I would call it The Force and say that George Lucas was right (since we can influence dark matter, by our own mass - maybe someone with midichlorians could have more influence?).
Even galaxies sometimes get divorced. Collisions are very stressful.
Don't know the double slit test? (Yeah right, geek) Go here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
In it, a photon targeting photo film through a double slit creates an interference pattern when left unobserved during the process. However, if one attempts to observe/detect the photon traveling through both slits, it only travels through one, leaving 2 standard lines. The typical take from this is that quantum uncertainty breaks down because the process was observed, forcing a choice to be made. However, photons aren't the only particle that exist in this uncertain state, and I believe we're getting a glimpse of that here.
The reason quantum uncertainty cannot be observed at laboratory scales is because the time scales would allow us to violate causality, and the universe doesn't allow for that. If dark matter is just some form of Boson-like material, which it definitely seems to act like, it would make sense that it could gravitationally interfere with itself in multiple galaxy collisions. The key being that no one or thing could have stopped these interactions from happening. "Observation" actually just denotes a probability of interfering, and the different ultra-massive pulls from various galaxies would create the uncertain path (double slit), as all mass centers involved would have multiple possible paths ahead of them. Since we had no ability to stop it when it happened, we get the pleasure of watching it now.
Gravity, as I see it, is nothing more than a cosmic echo of particle uncertainty spreading out from a dense mass covering the possibility that it could fly part at the electron shell level (theoretically) at any moment. Think if it as a massive object's footprint spreading forward into time. Less massive objects (like you and I) near the surface of the larger simply become statistics in the largest worst-scenario desegregation, and the probabilities of where we end up are much less complex than the massive core of a planet.
The smaller, brighter masses of the continuing galactic parts of collision mentioned in the article were likely sling-shotted through because of the massive gravitational pull of the early dark matter interference, which likely significantly subsided in strength as the dark matter uncertainty was reigned in by the pull of the gravity of the normal matter. Why? Since normal matter can interact with so many more particles/forces, It's level of uncertainty is reduced by the number of nearby particles which could interfere with it. Therefore, it's gravitational footprint would remain relatively static and condensed. This would cause the dark matter (by this time lumped as observed above) to be pulled like a jetstream as the densely certain mass imposed just a bit more certainty on the dark matter around it, reducing the net gravitational pull.
TL;DR; I propose that Dark Matter's low rate of interaction gives rise to gravitational interference. As an echo of quantum uncertainty, it gives rise to large fluctuations in gravitational fields acting on normal matter. Normal matter counteracts this gravitational interference through via higher levels of certainty imposing on dark matter. Uncertainty seems to be a property of particles most purely interacting with forces
Don't know the double slit test? (Yeah right, geek) Go here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
In it, a photon targeting photo film through a double slit creates an interference pattern when left unobserved during the process. However, if one attempts to observe/detect the photon traveling through both slits, it only travels through one, leaving 2 standard lines. The typical take from this is that quantum uncertainty breaks down because the process was observed, forcing a choice to be made. However, there's no reason that photons must be the only particle exhibits this uncertain state, and I believe we're getting a glimpse of that here.
The reason quantum uncertainty cannot be observed at laboratory scales is because the time scales would allow us to violate causality, and the universe doesn't allow for that. If "dark matter" is a form of Boson-like material, which it definitely seems to act like, it would make sense that it could gravitationally interfere with itself in multiple galaxy collisions. The key being that nothing had the opportunity to stop or alter these interactions, but each interaction had multiple spacial outcomes with equivalent probabilities. "Observation" actually just denotes a probability of interference, and the different ultra-massive pulls from various galaxies would create the uncertain path (double slit), as all mass centers involved would have multiple possible paths ahead of them. Since we had no ability to stop it when it happened, we get the pleasure of watching it now.
Gravity, as I see it, is the inversion and/or scattering of particle uncertainty when highly interacting particles clump together. Physicists would say that any object still maintains the possibility that it could fly part at the electron shell level (theoretically) at any moment. Think if it as a massive object's footprint spreading forward into time. Less massive objects (like you and I) near the surface of the larger simply become statistics in the largest worst-scenario desegregation, and the probabilities of where we end up are much less complex than the massive core of a planet.
The smaller, brighter masses of the continuing galactic parts of collision mentioned in the article were likely sling-shotted through because of the massive gravitational pull of the early dark matter interference, which likely significantly subsided in strength as the dark matter uncertainty was reigned in by the pull of the gravity of the normal matter. Why? Since normal matter can interact with so many more particles/forces, It's level of uncertainty is reduced by the number of nearby particles which could interfere with it. Therefore, it's gravitational footprint would remain relatively static and condensed. This would cause the dark matter (by this time lumped as observed above) to be pulled like a jetstream as the densely certain mass imposed just a bit more certainty on the dark matter around it, reducing the net gravitational pull.
TL;DR; I propose that Dark Matter's low rate of interaction gives rise to gravitational interference. As an echo of quantum uncertainty, it gives rise to large fluctuations in gravitational fields acting on normal matter. Normal matter counteracts this gravitational interference through via higher levels of certainty imposing on dark matter. Uncertainty seems to be a property of particles most purely interacting with forces.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
The remains of a technologically advanced civilization, pummelled into dark matter