Posted on 05/16/2019 7:52:15 AM PDT by BenLurkin
There's a "dark impactor" blasting holes in our galaxy.
Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often originating in smaller blobs of stars that collided with the galaxy in question.
Under normal conditions, the stream should be more or less a single line, stretched out by our galaxy's gravity, she said in her presentation. Astronomers would expect a single gap in the stream, at the point where the original globular cluster was before its stars drifted away in two directions. But Bonaca showed that GD-1 has a second gap. And that gap has a ragged edge — a region Bonaca called GD-1's "spur"... GD-1, it seems, was hit with that unseen bullet
This dense ball of unseen something plunging through our Milky Way offers physicists a new scrap of evidence that dark matter might be real. And it would suggest that dark matter is really "clumpy," as most theories about its behavior predict.
If dark matter is "clumpy," then it's concentrated in irregular chunks distributed roughly across galaxies — much like the luminous matter we see concentrated in stars and nebulae. Some alternative theories, including theories that suggest dark matter doesn't exist at all, ... and would have the effects of dark matter distributed smoothly across galaxies.
So far, Bonaca's discovery is one of a kind, so new that it hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal...
...she relied on data from the Gaia mission, an European Space Agency program to map billions of stars in our galaxy and their movements across the sky. It formed the best existing catalog of the stars that seem to be part of GD-1.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Galactus and the birth of the Silver Surfer?
I’ve been watching space science videos much more in recent months and my mind has been blown by just how vast space is. When light is depicted as crawling at a snail’s pace, you know you’re talking about vast distances.
Global warming.
Here is a mind blower:
Assume, if you travel at the speed of light, that, from your perspective, you arrive at your destination at exactly the moment you left your starting point (ignoring any accelleration or deceleration times).
This means that whether you are travelling a thousand miles or a million light years, you would be in both places at the same time.
Now imagine that you can travel in huge circles, arcs or figure 8’s, etc. It means you would be everywhere in the universe at once.
> Something Strange Punched a Hole in the Milky Way. <
What a let down. I thought this article was going to be about the candy bar.
It means you would be everywhere in the universe at once.
Isn’t everybody?
Or, how can you be two places at once if you’re
not any where at all?
"Can I buy some pot from you?"
“Can I buy some pot from you?”
Aw man I was gonna post that. GMTA.
You haven’t lost your delicate sense of humor, have you Nancy?
The Tomato That Ate East Cleveland ?
It means you would be everywhere in the universe at once.
Isn’t everybody?
Or, how can you be two places at once if you’re
not any where at all?
No matter where you are, there you are.
Very cool.
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