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X-rays From Other Galaxies Could Emanate From Particles of Dark Matter
sciencehabit writes "X-rays of a specific wavelength emanating from the hearts of nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters could be signs of particles of dark matter decaying in space, two independent teams of astronomers report (first study, second study). If that interpretation is correct, then dark matter could consist of strange particles called sterile neutrinos that weigh about 1/100 as much as an electron."
It took me a second to figure that out. Neutrinos don't participate in the strong force and don't have any flavor. (The names are charming, but kind of annoyingly ambiguous out of context.)
They sure are strange-weird if they don't even participate in the weak force, as other neutrinos do. They're barely there at all (if they ARE there at all).
but before the shouting about statistical noise begins,
RTFA... it sounds plausible.
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That is pollution left by the warp drives. The k'Thref effect causes small portions of neutrinos to go irrational.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
sterile neutrinos that weigh about 1/100 as much as an electron.
So what you're saying is, once you sterilize a neutrino, it only weighs 1/100 as much as when it still had balls. Those aren't just big brass ones, those are big brass ones armored in the stuff they armor Ogre's with.
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If you believe Figure 5 in this paper, I have a bitcoin exchange I would like to sell you.
Really ?
I thought Dark Matter existed as asteroids ? :-)
In asteroids. (Maybe.)
So can the recently discovered prevalence of "dark worlds", the startling number of planets that are *not* in orbit around a sun, only recently revealed by our best orbital telescopes and their occasional occulusion of other stars. Given such worlds widely spread across entire galaxies of interstellar space, galaxies could easily mass 20% more than expected from pure stellar mapping, which would handily explain most of the anomalies of galactic expansion.
Astronomers working on dark matter theories aren't ignoring that, and in fact were a big push for research into that starting over a decade ago. They expected to see a lot of occlusions to account for dark matter, but did not. The lack of and limited observations of such events sets a clear upper bound on how many such bodies can be in the galaxy and it is way below what is needed to explain rotation curves. The connections you draw to galactic densities and thinking 20% more observed baryonic mass is enough to explain situations suggests you don't really have any clue of the scale of the actual situations. Not only do you need to better examine real data, but you need to more than glance at the headlines as a start.
And this relates to dark matter how?
It's like having someone step on your foot in a dark room - you know somebody or something else is in there but you only know from one limited sense.
As for phlogiston - damn good idea to explain some reactions if you don't know there is more than one type of gas and it was associated with some useful empirical equations. Oxidation of iron didn't fit. Not long after oxygen was discovered. Phlogiston was science in action - put up an idea - test it - find where it doesn't work and then you can find another fit.
Nowhere near the same thing. We can see those with light and radio waves from the stuff behind them.
Not long after that oxygen was discovered
Phlogiston was a short-lived idea from before the discovery of oxygen. We don't know if it was taken seriously or was just a chemical shorthand to mark unusual reactions.
He might be a bot, but he also might not be a bot.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Yes, they (nuclear physicists) predicted the existence of and found a particle at around 1.27GEv. Might even be Higgs they said they were looking for. But they've outright defined dark matter and dark energy like Wilson's teapot - we can never see 'em directly, only their effects. Well, if these quantities can affect our physical universe, then there's a way for our universe to affect these quantities which means they do interact with normal matter and energy, and that means they should not be undetectable like Wilson's teapot.
Next thing you know, cosmologists will be telling us that G*D did it. I'm okay with that . . . but only if you come up with some kind of evidence, not merely "well, we can't find anything else to explain it...".
Thank you! Please stop inventing luminiferous aethers unless you can come up with something like evidence that one exists. Unexplained phenomena (e.g., "cosmic expansion") are not evidence.
I know that we know better now, but weren't neutrinos supposed to be massless when their existence was first proposed?
Sleep, little anonymous one. Sleep forever . . .
If you don't like it, why do you keep coming here?
The only problem (for me, certainly, no the theory) is that I don't understand how something with only 7kEv * c^2 of mass won't be seen already.
Sterile neutrinos are usually thought of as being produced by mixing with normal neutrinos. Hence the coupling to matter is extremely weak and with such low masses it is quite easy to imagine that they would have escaped detection so far. However neutrinos are produced with velocities near the speed of light in the Big Bang whereas dark matter is slow moving (it's "Cold Dark Matter") so it seems unlikely unless there is some production mechanism which can produce them at a slower velocity. Also, not that it really makes much difference but technically these are gamma rays not x-rays. The energy ranges for both overlap and the name depends on how they are produced - in physics photons from particle decay or annihilation are gamma rays.
It's a neutrino that we've never detected. Okay, I'll bite. How do we detect/identify a sterile neutrino? For bonus points - we've been looking for neutrinos as a species for a little while now, if there is a way to detect and identify a sterile neutrino, why haven't we seen these yet? This kind of assertion requires more than three sigma confidence with noted exceptions. Just sayin'.
That's only peripherally related - Dark Pixels. Very difficult to see.
--- Mercutio was right.
And the gravitational lensing the in the galactic voids is just magic. Fully transparent voids that are 10x-100x larger than the Milkyway, with no observable matter, not even dust, yet huge amounts of detectable gravity via lensing back-ground galaxies.
You realize our current accepted theories of quantum mechanics have the luminiferous aether in spades, right? It's called the electron field, which permeates the entire universe and has "electrons" as energetic disturbances within it. It's joined by many other aethers, I mean fields, such as the family of quark fields, the neutrino fields and the Higgs field(s).
It's hilarious when Slashdot armchair science critics use that example.
Yes, these theories explain the observed phenomena - but so does "G*d did it!". Theories are great - but a little more suporting evidence would be in order, I think.
I do believe OP is mentioning the "Good Shepherd" episode of ST:Voyager. I know it is the only thing I have been thinking about this whole time.