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 ...
It was created 6000 years ago.
Cool. Bump for later reading on God blowing some smoke rings.
“multi, human-generational space team that will perpetuate itself in space”
And force the unborn people to live a life that they didn’t choose, for which they are not at all adapted, which is totally unlike life on Earth, and which they can not leave.
It is totally unreasonable to expect that the people born many years in the future in a metal tube out in space would not go completely mad, because they will never enjoy the sunrise, birds twittering, children playing on the lawn, taking a dog for a walk, climbing a mountain, and the millions of things that we enjoy on this Earth.
Forcing them to live and die in a metal tube is complete arrogant cruelty.
In other words, it’s a dumb idea.
Errr...ummm...sorry for my misinterpretation of your post.
Your ideas have been explored in dozens, if not hundreds, of science fiction books. You can’t sue people for appropriation of ideas, particularly very general ones that are put out in places like discussion forums. Duh!
Agreed.
One theory is that dark matter is computonium, that is the end result of advanced intelligence converting local matter and energy into computing AIs.
The theory is given a complete going over in this book (which I've made a link to the author's web site for those who are interested. :
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Many.
BTW: I was not saying that the rules for making a theory make sense, just what I perceive them to be.
ping. thought this might interest you, buddy.
I’m still alive, just been out of pocket for a good while.
It was done using the “Dark Matter” tool in photoshop.
ghostly ring of dark matter
What I get in the pan when I fry fish in the middle of the campfire.
Bung Nebula?
They would only know what they would know. they would find joys in intersellar space. We live on a cosmic satellite anyway. Its just big and blue. Besides, we would let them take a PlayStation 3 to kill time.
ha ha. so you’ve already started writing? jk.
ping
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