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dark matter mapped
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: |
It is the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos. Now, scientists have created the first image of dark matter
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 08 January 2007
One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.
Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.
Scientists have known for many years that there is more to the universe than can be seen or detected through their telescopes but it is only now that they have been able to capture the first significant 3D-image of this otherwise invisible material.
Unlike the ordinary matter of the planets, stars and galaxies, which can be seen through telescopes or detected by scientific instruments, nobody has seen dark matter or knows what it is made of, though calculations suggest that it is at least six times bigger than the rest of the visible universe combined.
A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to build up a picture of dark matter in a vast region of space where some of the galaxies date back to half the age of the universe - nearly 7 billion years.
They used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, to investigate an area of the sky nine times the size of a full moon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of any matter that it passes on its journey through space.
The scientists were able to exploit the technique by collecting the distorted light from half a million faraway galaxies to reconstruct some of the missing mass of the universe which is otherwise invisible to conventional telescopes.
"We have, for the first time, mapped the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe," said Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team. "Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe."
One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed.
Although cosmologists have theorised that this would be the case, the findings are dramatic proof that their calculations are correct and that, without dark matter, the known universe that we can see would not be able to exist.
"A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter - including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built," Dr Massey said. "The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe," he said.
The three-dimensional map of dark matter was built up by taking slices through different regions of space much like a medical CT scanner build a 3-D image of the body by taking different X-ray "slices" in two dimensions.
Data from the Hubble telescope was supplemented by measurements from telescopes on the ground, such as the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
Details of the dark matter map were released yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle and published online by the journal Nature. The map stretches half way back to the beginning of the universe and shows that dark matter has formed into "clumps" as it collapsed under gravity. Other matter then grouped around these clumps to form the visible stars, galaxies and planets.
"The 3-D information is vital to studying the evolution of the structures over cosmic time," said Jason Rhodes of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Astronomers have compared the task of detecting dark matter to the difficulty of photographing a city at night from the air when only street lights are visible.
Scientists said the new images were equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Major arteries and intersections become evident and a variety of neighbourhoods are revealed.
"Now that we have begun to map out where dark matter is, the next challenge is to determine what it is, and specifically its relationship to normal matter," Dr Massey said. "We have answered the first question about where the dark matter it, but the ultimate goal will be to determine what it is."
Various experiments on Earth are under way to try to find out what dark matter is made of. One theory is that it is composed of mysterious sub-atomic particles that are difficult to detect because they do not interact with ordinary matter and so cannot be picked up and identified by conventional scientific instruments. Comparing the maps of visible matter and dark matter have already pointed to anomalies that could prove critical to the understanding of what constitutes dark matter. |
that pic means less than nothing to me but i thought id include it for those that might grasp it :D im just really impressed that something only science fiction a couple of decades ago has been shown to most likely exist. respect to those people looking at the universe for something nobody can see ;) |
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| DevilDogUSMC |
Great book that's easy to get into is Stephen Hawking's
"Universe Explained". And only has one equation. |
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| DJ Shibby |
I don't buy it.
The whole "Dark Matter" thing.
I think that our current theories are unable to determine yet what actually happens out there in the void, and we keep building on TOP of old theories, instead of taking steps backwards to rectify errors. The reason we can't do this is most likely because our system of arithmetic itself may be the root of the problem, disallowing the cohesion of absolute information and theoretical inquery.
So yeah... we can't actually ascertain the weight of galaxies and solar systems, so we sloppily make up a variable, "dark matter", to encompass everything that we don't yet understand or doesn't fit correctly into our models.
I don't doubt that there are entire spectrums of vibrational waves as well as material objects that we can't even detect in *any* possible way yet. Overlapping universes, new types of states of matter beyond plasma, or maybe just errors in how mass actually functions in its non-dimensional reality. |
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| Krypton |
| Why is there even matter? |
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| DevilDogUSMC |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
I don't buy it.
The whole "Dark Matter" thing.
I think that our current theories are unable to determine yet what actually happens out there in the void, and we keep building on TOP of old theories, instead of taking steps backwards to rectify errors. The reason we can't do this is most likely because our system of arithmetic itself may be the root of the problem, disallowing the cohesion of absolute information and theoretical inquery.
So yeah... we can't actually ascertain the weight of galaxies and solar systems, so we sloppily make up a variable, "dark matter", to encompass everything that we don't yet understand or doesn't fit correctly into our models.
I don't doubt that there are entire spectrums of vibrational waves as well as material objects that we can't even detect in *any* possible way yet. Overlapping universes, new types of states of matter beyond plasma, or maybe just errors in how mass actually functions in its non-dimensional reality. |
Well I believe because there are inconsitencies in weight
that they believe that itself is proof of dark matter. Another
interesting idea deals with gravity. They haven't figured it
out all the way and have thought that maybe gravity is seeping
into another dimension. It's alot deeper than that but I
think that's the gist. |
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| DevilDogUSMC |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
I don't buy it.
The whole "Dark Matter" thing.
I think that our current theories are unable to determine yet what actually happens out there in the void, and we keep building on TOP of old theories, instead of taking steps backwards to rectify errors. The reason we can't do this is most likely because our system of arithmetic itself may be the root of the problem, disallowing the cohesion of absolute information and theoretical inquery.
So yeah... we can't actually ascertain the weight of galaxies and solar systems, so we sloppily make up a variable, "dark matter", to encompass everything that we don't yet understand or doesn't fit correctly into our models.
I don't doubt that there are entire spectrums of vibrational waves as well as material objects that we can't even detect in *any* possible way yet. Overlapping universes, new types of states of matter beyond plasma, or maybe just errors in how mass actually functions in its non-dimensional reality. |
Well I believe because there are inconsitencies in weight
that they believe that itself is proof of dark matter. Another
interesting idea deals with gravity. They haven't figured it
out all the way and have thought that maybe gravity is seeping
into another dimension. It's alot deeper than that but I
think that's the gist. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
I don't buy it.
The whole "Dark Matter" thing.
I think that our current theories are unable to determine yet what actually happens out there in the void, and we keep building on TOP of old theories, instead of taking steps backwards to rectify errors. The reason we can't do this is most likely because our system of arithmetic itself may be the root of the problem, disallowing the cohesion of absolute information and theoretical inquery.
So yeah... we can't actually ascertain the weight of galaxies and solar systems, so we sloppily make up a variable, "dark matter", to encompass everything that we don't yet understand or doesn't fit correctly into our models.
I don't doubt that there are entire spectrums of vibrational waves as well as material objects that we can't even detect in *any* possible way yet. Overlapping universes, new types of states of matter beyond plasma, or maybe just errors in how mass actually functions in its non-dimensional reality. |
you're gonna have to do better than that, if youre gonna fly in the face of popular expert opinion. |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
you're gonna have to do better than that, if youre gonna fly in the face of popular expert opinion. |
Hm... actually, I don't.
I think I can have a different opinion than the general opinion if I please, whether you like it or not.
And as your cute little oxymoron, where exactly do the popular experts get their qualifications?
Oh... that's right, their models are mostly based on Einstein's model of relativity, in which he himself said that our theories are guesses that attempt poorly to mold to what is actual reality and not vice versa.
You're gonna have to do better than that.
peace |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
Hm... actually, I don't.
I think I can have a different opinion than the general opinion if I please, whether you like it or not.
And as your cute little oxymoron, where exactly do the popular experts get their qualifications?
Oh... that's right, their models are mostly based on Einstein's model of relativity, in which he himself said that our theories are guesses that attempt poorly to mold to what is actual reality and not vice versa.
You're gonna have to do better than that.
peace |
what i meant was- these scientists are the ones that are looking for it (dark matter), theyre the ones crunching the numbers and evaluating the models. if youre going to disagree with them, then you should also be working through the same hypotheses, to show why theyre not accurate. basically im gonna accept their assessment at face value coz i certainly cant do the work myself. perhaps you can, and if so id love for you to explain it to me ;) |
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| Marc Summers |
| We are one step closer! |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
what i meant was- these scientists are the ones that are looking for it (dark matter), theyre the ones crunching the numbers and evaluating the models. if youre going to disagree with them, then you should also be working through the same hypotheses, to show why theyre not accurate. basically im gonna accept their assessment at face value coz i certainly cant do the work myself. perhaps you can, and if so id love for you to explain it to me ;) |
Ah, I see.
Well if I had to guess, I'd say that they're taking in various ranges of electromagnetic radiation and perhaps inversing that data.
It's a little strange how haphazard their current diagram turned out to be. Personally, I just don't think we have the tools yet to really grasp what other potential dimensions or material states can exist... but, as with all things, this information will come with time and progress.
I'm not sure if I even believe this massive gulf of space outside of our galaxy to be the do-all-end-all of the system we label "universe". I would equate it more to earth and space in the past 1000 years... they theorized all sorts of things, from angels, to gods, to ether and machinations. Right now we believe it to be a vacuum, which in itself is rather difficult to conceptualize. It also creates the error that all that "space" out there is just null void; it's actually a topographical series of huge amounts of varying amounts of "stuff".
I mean think about it... we have not come up with any machine here on earth that can simulate a vacuum. It's really just a word to label the circumstances we believe to be occuring (pressureless/etc, as opposed to a plenum). We can create tight-locked closed systems, but they are not vacuums. We can simulate antigravity through supersonic flight, but it's still nowhere near the situation in space, which itself shifts as the variables we do know -- temperature, density, etc -- raise and fall through the universe.
So what about the variables we can't yet measure and the effects they may have? I imagine eventually we will have self-replicating "droids", for lack of a better word, crawling through space-time mapping its components, and perhaps they'll be able to come up with some fun new layers of consciousness necessary to fathom all this fun stuff.
Until then, these guys are doing research and that never hurt anyone; I was just stating my viewpoint on the whole dark matter deadend (in my opinion:D) |
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