Slashdot Mirror
The Milky Way Is Much Less Massive Than Previous Thought
schwit1 writes: New research by astronomers suggests that the Milky Way is about half as massive as previously estimated. It was thought to be roughly the same mass as Andromeda, weighing in at approximately 1.26 x 10^12 solar masses (PDF). This new research indicates its mass is around half the mass of Andromeda. "Galaxies in the Local Group are bound together by their collective gravity. As a result, while most galaxies, including those on the outskirts of the Local Group, are moving farther apart due to expansion, the galaxies in the Local Group are moving closer together because of gravity. For the first time, researchers were able to combine the available information about gravity and expansion to complete precise calculations of the masses of both the Milky Way and Andromeda. ... Andromeda had twice as much mass as the Milky Way, and in both galaxies 90 percent of the mass was made up of dark matter."
Try the milky way diet plan. You too can lose 1.3 quadrillion solar masses in just one month trying the Milky Way(TM) diet.
Check out these before and after shots: you can't even see the dark matter anymore.
You're right, please support HR-27-1337, placing a 200% tax on politicizing random science discussions.
The Milky Way Galaxy was seen running off while crying about its impending demotion to dwarf galaxy status.
Good news for everyone who's lactose intolerant.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Dust blocks light and turns it into heat, which it radiates. So it shows up on infrared telescopes you mentioned.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Different amounts of mass result in different star types which give up different types of light. non-star objects - dust, planets, etc. block light and radiate out the energy they absorb as heat.
So by looking at any point, we can tell how much mass it has by the amount and type of light it gives off, including the non-visible spectrum, i.e. heat.
There are a few assumptions made, but it makes a lot of sense, mathematically.
None of it would have been possible before we understood the formulas behind fusion.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Starting from the Earth getting kicked out from the center of the universe to the present hypothesis that visible matter is just a tiny fraction of all the stuff in the universe, having the mass of the Milky Way reduced is just another step in what Carl Sagan called The Great Demotions. Hopefully by now humanity is getting used to it.
Well, to be fair, most of the mass is *not* in the stars, but the dark matter. It might be a reasonable inference that twice the stars would also mean twice the dark matter, but that might not necissarily be true.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If, however, the "dark matter" does not interact with electromagnetism, but only with gravity and the weak force, (which would be an extremely odd, and frankly, a not very believable aspect of cosmology) things would get a bit tricky.
That is EXACTLY what most of the dark matter is suspected to be and that is what makes it tricky.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Marketing suggested that now it should be called the Skim Milky Way.
The article says that most of the galaxies are moving apart, but the Local Group is moving closer. Why would the local group be different than the other galaxies? Are there other groups of galaxies that are seeing the same effect, or is the Local Group an anomaly?
The galaxies in the local group are close enough together to be a gravitationally bound system, and are therefore "decoupled" from the expansion. This is true of any cluster of galaxies, and there are many, many examples of such systems in the universe.
It's the same reason your body doesn't get bigger as the universe expands: the binding forces holding it together are stronger than the (tiny) force pulling it apart due to cosmological expansion.
They've been mapping Dark Matter based on gravitational lensing. "Nothing" doesn't cause gravitational lensing, so we know something is there, and whatever it is, there is almost 10x more of it than what we can see in the entire EM spectrum from radio to gamma.
If they can be that wrong about something so fundamental, then how can they possibly claim to understand things or be right now?
It's not like they discovered that Andromeda is actually a 20-foot wide disco ball with funhouse mirrors making it look bigger than it really is. When you're talking about a branch of science that typically works in orders of magnitude, a factor of 2 is a pretty minor change.
All known stable forms of matter take only four forms: The lightest charged lepton, the electron, the lightest baryon, the proton, the nearly massless neutrinos, and atomic nuclei built from bound states of protons and neutrons. All but the neutrinos interact with matter in well-known ways that we can definitely measure (they are, or contain, electrically charged particles and therefore emit and scatter photons, which are relatively easily picked up). The neutrinos only undergo weak force interactions, but modern detectors can still pick them up. Their known number density and the limits on their mass mean they can't account for the observed gravitational binding of galaxies.
Any normal matter would interact with the light from objects behind it. This is the origin of effects such as the Lyman Forest which reveals the distribution of cold hydrogen in the flight path of distant light... The bottom line is, baryonic matter in the quantities implied simply has nowhere to hide. It's just too easy to detect ten times a galaxy's mass of matter sprinkled among the galaxy's visible part.
Hence the hypothesis of a particle which has mass but no electric charge, color charges or weak hypercharge. It would cast a gravitational shadow but otherwise be virtually undetectable since it does not undergo any interactions we can make individual particle measurements of. Hence the 'dark' in dark matter. One of the few alternatives to a dark particle is a universe suffused with low-mass black holes, but the lack of either microlensing events or gravitational waves emitted by their scattering off each other is difficult to explain. There are a few other places in GR that you can insert hypothetical terms without making it blow up in the face of observations - in fact Einstein's original cosmological constant very effectively explains accelerating expansion. It's also possible that GR isn't the correct theory of geometrodynamics, and the effect of higher-order curvature terms or such is not zero.
GR and QFT are fundamentally incompatible (GR is classical, QFT is quantum), so while there absolutely must be new physics out there, the question is where the new physics lays and what form it takes (and can we ever reach the energy levels to directly investigate it). The belief among physicists is that the correct theory should be the simplest one which fully explains observed phenomenon - Hence why, for example, GR as currently postulated does not involve any higher order curvatures - and the standard cosmological constant / cold dark matter framework does a remarkable job of explaining the evolution of the universe to its present state with remarkably few parameters.
The commonwealth is a lot smaller than expected!
Yes, I went there.... Deal with my vast knowledge of really bad SciFi!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.