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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."
http://www.space.com/16412-dark-matter-filament-galaxy-clusters.html
Futurama fans already know that that filament is a result of Nibblonian diarrhea being ejected into space.
My kingdom for a donkey!
First of all, don't go to "page 2" and I use that term loosely. Secondly, it doesn't mention a single scientific detail about how they determined that the light was being bent around a filament-shaped object compared to the starts behind it actually being in the location the light suggests. It merely states "They used a model to subtract out the masses of the galaxy clusters and then fit the remaining mass with a model of what a filament might look like. They found that a filament must be present." So in other words, they didn't find anything other than a mathematical equation suggesting dark matter exists. Congratuations are in order indeed.
Aha, someone posted a hair bit of time ahead of me a much better article so let me ammend that with the short version:
There are 2 galaxies kinda far apart but they're really overlapped from Earth's point of view. Like one is almost entirely behind the other. So the back galaxy's light passes along where the filament would be estimated to be between the galaxies. So the light travels through the dark matter's gravitational field for a really long time, running practically parallel to the filament. Even after that much light gravity tugging, it's barely perceptable by our current telescopes. So someone had some pics of this set of galaxies from 2001 but never did anything with them because they didn't realize the opportunity. This new team noticed it, compared it to background light to detect additional possible lensing, and discovered unmistakeable slight lensing. So something is obviously there and it has to be a particular shape, density, and reflect no light.
Dark Matter was proven decades ago as this following article demonstrates.
Bell Labs Proves Existence of Dark Suckers
For years it has been believed that electric bulbs emitted light. However, recent information from Bell Labs has proven otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light, they suck dark. Thus they now call these bulbs dark suckers. The dark sucker theory, according to a Bell Labs spokesperson, proves the existence of dark, that dark has mass heavier than that of light, and that dark is faster than light.
The basis of the dark sucker theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. Take for example, the dark suckers in the room where you are. There is less dark
right next to them than there is elsewhere. The larger the dark sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark suckers in a parking lot have a
much greater capacity than the ones in this room. As with all things, dark suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the black spot on a full dark sucker. A candle is a primitive dark sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You will notice that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark which
has been sucked into it. If you hold a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, the tip will turn black because it got in the path of the dark flowing into the candle.
Unfortunately, these primitive dark suckers have a very limited range. There are also portable dark suckers. The bulbs in these can't handle all
of the dark by themselves, and must be aided by a dark storage unit. When the dark storage unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before
the portable dark sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a dark sucker, friction from this mass generates heat. Thus it is not wise to touch an operating dark sucker.
Candles present a special problem, as the dark must travel in the solid wick instead of through glass. This generates a great amount of heat. Thus it can be very dangerous to touch an operating candle. Dark is also heavier than light. If you swim deeper and deeper, you notice it gets slowly darker
and darker. When you reach a depth of approximately fifty feet, you are in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats to the top. The immense power of dark can be utilized to mans advantage. We can collect the dark that has settled to the bottom of lakes and push it through turbines, which generate electricity and help push it to the ocean where it may be safely stored.
Prior to turbines, it was much more difficult to get dark from the rivers and lakes to the ocean. The Indians recognized this problem, and tried to
solve it. When on a river in a canoe travelling in the same direction as the flow of the dark, they paddled slowly, so as not to stop the flow of dark, but when they traveled against the flow of dark, they paddled quickly so as to help push the dark along its way.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in an illuminated room in front of a closed, dark closet, then slowly open the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet, but since the dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.
In conclusion, Bell Labs stated that dark suckers make all our lives much easier. So the next time you look at an electric bulb remember that it is indeed a dark sucker.
Non-luminous normal matter absorbs light (and so becomes luminous normal matter evenutally, at least at some frequency).
BTW, the confirmation for dark matter vs other theories for galaxy rotation came from the WMAP data. IIRC, about 80% of the early matter of the universe was shown to be somehting that interacted gravitationally, but did not interact with light (or electrons). The actual % of dark matter measured matched the amount predicted by the dark matter hypothesis for galaxy rotation rates, which is a pretty convincing confirmation IMO.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, except that if 80% of the mass in our galaxy was simply non-luminous, we'd still see the "haze" from it, just as we can see evidence of the existing hydrogen haze by it's characteristic absorbtion spectra, especially when starlight passes through nebula where the diffuse matter density is extremely high. Perhaps the vast majority simply formed gas giants and the like that were two small to "ignite", recent evidence does suggest wandering planets may be far more common than star-bound ones, but to get the 5:1 ratio still we'd be talking about 5000 Jupiters for every sun, and the sun is actually pretty tiny as stars go - with that many dark planets whizzing around it seems likely we'd see some evidence of them, likely of the frequent "Gas giant zooms through solar system, multiple planetary orbits disrupted, news at 11" sort. If the planets were smaller the "invasions" would be even more frequent, and if they were much larger (we're not sure of the exact limit) they'd spontaneously ignite
Then again - if using general relativity rather than Newtonian gravity actually does explain the odd rotational characteristics of our galaxy without reliance on massive amounts of additional matter then you may be right. There's still things like the Bullet Cluster that show evidence of something very weird going on though - the gravitational lensing seems to have become partially disconnected from the visible matter - if "dark matter" was simply non-luminous you would expect it to still have distribution and gravitational-collision properties similar to the glowing stuff, which is not the case there. Whatever is causing the lensing is behaving in a manner fundamentally different than the matter we can see, in fact it appears to be largely unaffected by the collision at all, which would seem to at odds with many "simple" dark matter theories as well (i.e. it's like normal matter, except light passes right through it).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Dark suckers.
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 like a sophomore project in universe design class. A way-too-slow hard-coded top speed, lots of localized buffer overflows without proper error handling or anything (Too much mass in one place should at LEAST throw an exception,) particles popping in and out of existence all the time, and the whole thing is held together by duck tape and dark matter. Honestly, I might give this universe a "C"... if I was feeling generous.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Un-doing 7 well-deserved mod points to post this, so pay attention. Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility. The team explicitly stated that further confirmation is needed before they can say they found Higgs, or a Higgs-sized particle that does not do the things Higgs Boson is supposed to do.
It is still up in the air as to whether we have a Higgs Boson, or a Higgs-less theory of mass. Obviously everyone is leaning towards Higgs because it matches predictions. But what if it is Higgs sized without having the correct properties? Then you're wrong, and also an idiot for assuming it is a given.
If we indeed found it, then you're a lucky guess at best.
I agree this is more important, but only because we have been zeroing in on a Higgs-sized particle for quite some time. Dark matter has been purely theoretical until now (and still this is only the first sighting, subject to review and revision as with all experimental results). More important because it's newer.
In truth, we won't know for a hundred years which is more important. If dark matter has been theorized since 1930's and we just confirmed it, it is no more important than such ideas as gravitational lensing which have been around for decades before being confirmed. We have known it for a long time, in other words. To me, more important would be strong evidence that a 90 year old hypothesis was completely incorrect and in need of revision.
Neither one of these, to me, beats a fat man finally seeing his toes after 30 years. He had a feeling they were there, and had been told as much, but to finally see them is a whole different ball game.
first post
Dark post; doesn't matter.
"African American."
Umm... I'm not so sure such "dark" humor is quite appropriate.
It's estimated that there are 5 times as many dark posts as regular productive ones.