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 ...
Mogen David
rofl
Do giant wild random guesses technically qualify as a “theory?”
Looks to me like a ghostly ring of no matter.
ping
Unless it was something else that bent the light.
Klaatu barada nikto.
Considering the age of the earth and the speed of light, this is probably what we look like from 5 billion light years away.
Now you're getting into a whole new area of speculation, eh? Gravity waves, maybe?
I hereby name this “Rosie’s Sphincter”.
—Is this an explicit admission of tweaking data to support preconceived notions?—
Very similar to the Globull Warming scam.
There’s a great sci-fi story about aliens rushing to earth because they knew, from their scriptures, that the beings there were created in God’s image, had personal visit from the Son, etc.
They were sorely disappointed when they got here. Contemplated anniliation, thinking perhaps humans were invaders . . . then just going home deeply saddened with decision to lie about what they found.
Sounds familiar
We will be if the telemarketers get to them first.
The Hubble belongs in a museum at the end of its life, not burned up in the atmosphere.
Looks like it should be called the Bung Nebula
Spice.
What was the title and author?
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve decided to make the announcement of my recent discovery here on FR in regard to dark matter. It’s rather quite shocking once you think about it and I’ve thought about this long and hard but its implications are, well, earth altering. While it is true that man has contemplated trave
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