Posted on 05/15/2007 12:13:56 PM PDT by Hadean
Astronomers have discovered an enormous, ghostly ring of dark matter 5 billion light years away — the most blatant evidence to date for the existence of a mysterious substance hidden throughout the universe.
Dark matter makes up a vast majority of gravity-exerting mass in the universe, while only about 10 percent is matter we can see and touch. If dark matter didn't exist, scientists say, galaxies like the Milky Way would have already flown apart from a severe lack of gravitational "glue."
Researchers pointed the aging but powerful Hubble Space Telescope toward a cluster of galaxies known as cluster ZwCl0024+1652. At first glance, the then-unknown ring looked like a ripple in a pond over the twinkling galactic cluster. Story continues below ↓advertisement
"I was annoyed when I saw the ring because I thought it was an artifact," said M. James Jee of Johns Hopkins University.
But it wasn't a glitch.
The more Jee and others tried to remove the ring by tweaking the data, the more the ring-like anomaly stuck out like sore thumb. "It took more than a year to convince myself that the ring was real," Jee said. "I've looked at a number of clusters and I haven't seen anything like this."
Because so much dark matter resides in the ring, astronomers said, it bends the light around it to create the ripple effect — dark matter's calling card. The findings were announced at a NASA press conference today.
The ring, 2.6-million light-years wide, formed when two huge clusters of galaxies slammed together in a head-on collision roughly 1 to 2 billion years ago, puffing the mysterious matter outward, the astronomers figure. If the galactic hit-and-run had occurred outside of Earth's line-of-sight, the result might look more like an oval.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Is it surrounding Michael Moore? :)
One theory is that dark matter is computonium, that is the end result of advanced intelligence converting local matter and energy into computing AIs.
Lets send Rosie O’Donell to investigate this matter personally.
Look at all those galaxies, we are not alone.
“It took more than a year to convince myself that the ring was real,”
What a job. I’d like to get paid to stare at something for a year. Then again, no thanks.
When you’re in space looking at the earth and moon, you only see “dark space” since, there is nothing there. Are we simply looking at the space between objects and getting the wrong inference?
Red or white?
It’s Al Gores fault.
Is that a ring of dark matter around Uranus?
Might as well be, the nearest hot galactic chicks are thousands of light years away, although if you visit my website you can virtually meet thousands of galactobabes
who just would love to meet YOU.
Etc.etc.etc
Why would they want to do that, i.e. "remove the ring?" Is this an explicit admission of tweaking data to support preconceived notions?
'Scuse me!
saveit bump
Did they try cleaning the lens on the Hubble to be sure?
The space between earth and moon doesn't distort their images or obscure them. Dark matter is detected by the fact that it distorts objects or bends the light from them in some way.
But if there is nothing more to learn of space travel, we are alone. At least effectively.
That is impressive stuff. I can’t wait for the James Webb telescope to really kick exploration up some notches.
How do we know what we look like from 5 billion light years away?
“Are we simply looking at the space between objects and getting the wrong inference?”
Well, it’s space that is bending light, indicating gravity, so I would say, “no.” There is certainly SOMETHING there.
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