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Dark Matter Filament Finally Found
An anonymous reader writes "Everyone is talking about the recent Higgs boson announcement by the scientists at CERN, but another significant scientific discovery was revealed this week as well. In a study published online in the journal Nature on Wednesday, scientists show that they have successfully found the first dark matter filament."
Yeah this post didn't deserve a downmod. It was an applicable use of pop-culture humor.
Actually, it generally goes the other way - when a non-star initially forms it will be hot, and has to radiate all that energy away, becoming less bright until it eventually becomes effectively non-luminous. Starlight simply isn't dense enough to significantly heat anything substantially - it will be radiated away as fast as it gets absorbed, and that's *way* below what we can currently detect. Our telescopes may eventually become sensitive to detect such MACHOs directly, but they're not there yet. And micro-lensing studies seem to limit them to comprising roughly the same amount of matter as luminous objects unless they're predominantly >100 solar masses (which would likely tend to be radiant) or less than Moon-sized, in which case there would need to be so many of them that they would likely be passing through the solar system on a fairly regular basis, which we haven't seen.
If we're talking about stuff in intergalactic filaments though - well, they make interstellar space look positively dense, anything non-luminous would be so close to absolute zero, and so far away, that it would be effectively invisible unless directly in front of something. And it would have to be in a pretty frakking dense cloud to significantly blot out a galaxy Remember that as a wave light will bend around any object in it's path, not much, but slightly (this effect is completely separate from gravitational lensing) and over intergalactic distances that's enough that the "cumulative effects" of a million individual objects each blocking one millionth of the "disc" of a distant galaxy will be far less than you would expect.
As for galactic rotation and WMAP - there is correlation there, I'll give you that, and when two independent measures give you similar results you should probably sit up and take notice. However, when something like the general-relativity explanation for galactic rotation speeds comes along and says - "Hey, you know that really weird behavior we couldn't explain that made us come up with a really bizarre theory to explain? Well we finally have the computational power to run the analysis using the currently accepted theory of gravity instead of the much simpler but known-flawed centuries old model, and everything works out pretty close to what we actually see." Well, that should make you take notice as well. In fact that should make you sit back and take a long hard look at all your "cosmological gravity weirdness", because most of that happens on a scale where galactic distances look positively local, so you'd expect the discrepancy between instantaneous Newtonian gravity and GR gravity to be even larger.
Astronomy is a somewhat shaky field - all theories are fundamentally untestable - all you can do is look out at the universe and try to find phenomena that seem to support or counter theory, but in doing so you're making numerous assumptions about what exactly you're looking at to begin with, and assuming it behaves in a manner consistent with other widely accepted but still fundamentally untestable theories. Now that technique is surprisingly effective, but it is vulnerable to flaws in analysis, especially when much analysis is based on something that is known to be inaccurate (Newtonian gravity) because the alternative is too computationally expensive to use.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's estimated that there are 5 times as many dark posts as regular productive ones.