Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted 66
TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com:
Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster.
"The signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. "With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations," added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."
"The signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. "With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations," added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."
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Does this basic principle of scientific inquiry not apply to cosmology????
Go on then, what's the simpler explanation?
Re:Anatomically Correct! (Score:5, Funny)
You sound like the kind of guy who goes around the neighborhood putting penises on all the snowmen.
That's a lot better than the guy who goes around putting a penis in all the snowmen...
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I think sterile neutrinos are among the least-exotic explanations that hasn't been ruled out yet. Still, I'd love more information here: Why hasn't this been seen before? What theories predict x-rays at these energies? What kinds of confirmation are feasable?
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Oops wish I could self-edit. The paper is short and easy to read. It answers pretty much all these questions.
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Keep in mind that what information comes out of journalists is typically 10 times more outrageous than any of the scientists' claims.
Re:Whence Occam's Razor? (Score:5, Informative)
It does. That is why dark matter is the leading theory at the moment. It is the simplest one, with the least additional elements, that can actually explain all available observations.
There are plenty of simpler theories that can't, though, if you prefer things that are known to be wrong.
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The best part: (Score:1)
Much more important than the obsession with proving that it is dark matter and not a limit of the relativity models, we'd actually have a real name for the stuff.
"Dark matter" was a lame filler term from day one. If it turns out to be abundant masses of sterile neutrinos, then we can all go look up what "sterile" means in regards to a particle type that is already infamous for ignoring everything else until it rams into a proton or neutron in a head-on crash.
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Parallel observation: letting programmers name the programs they're writing is about as smart as letting the marketing department actually write the code.
Omicron Persei 8 (Score:2)
Perseus?
It's Omicron Persei 8 complaining about the cancellation of Single Female Lawyer.
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Common mistake I know. However, once you consider its distance and the 6000 year age of the universe, the distance of 237 million light years is well within the range you would expect to find if God wanted light to move faster so that we could see it as part of His plan.
Old news ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why does it take for ever? (Score:4, Funny)
The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."
Back in my days, every mysterious signal from every star system follows a well rehearsed routine. People get beamed down, they see even more mysterious things happen and finally they get everything resolved and are back in the Enterprise in 46 minutes, all set up and ready to boldly go where no man had gone before. Come on, resolve it already scientists. Whats the matter with you lazy bums?
Old news, probably not dark matter (Score:5, Informative)
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I guess this is supposed to be newsworthy because of this part of TFA, missing from the summary:
If the results — which will be published next week in the journal Physical Review Letters — hold up, they could usher in a new era in astronomy, study team members said.
What, what? Something's wrong here. (Score:1)
I can only wonder how the researchers arrived at their conclusion when there are so very many other sources of X-rays in the universe. In fact if you were looking far dark matter you would ignore any signal coming from a galaxy and only look for signals coming from *outside* the galaxy, which is where dark matter is believed to exist.
Re:What, what? Something's wrong here. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only wonder how the researchers arrived at their conclusion when there are so very many other sources of X-rays in the universe.
It's probably because they're better qualified in physics than you are.
Re:What, what? Something's wrong here. (Score:4, Funny)
By now you must know the denizens of /. are leading lights in fields as diverse as biology, geology, climatology, economics and physics. It's a goddamned wonder that half the posters here don't have Nobel prizes in their back pockets.
And yet, generous souls that they are, they still have time to complain about Ruby on Rails. We truly live in an age of giants!
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It's a goddamned wonder that half the posters here don't have Nobel prizes in their back pockets.
Well I did just happen to come by one of those at a recent auction.
While my original thought was to have a bronze statue of myself constructed to display it I suppose I can keep it in a back pocket instead, though it might present an obstacle being in such close proximity to where I usually pull my slashdot posts from...
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Is it more likely that there is a magic unobservable substance that makes our models correct or that our models need tuning?
Yes.
Re:What, what? Something's wrong here. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a bad thing to be extra cautious around buzz words.
Dark matter isn't a buzz word, at least not to the people who are actually trying to discover if it exists, and what it is. It's a hypothesis, or a class of hypotheses.
Dark Matter feels like a fudge factor for our ability to observe the universe or our models of it.
You could say that about anything that was hypothesised before it was confirmed - the atomic nucleus, photons, quantum mechanics.
Hey, these numbers don't add up- just stick in another variable.
And then see if the new model is a better match for observations, work out if there are any other consequences of the new variable, search for experimental evidence of those consequences... AKA science.
Is it more likely that there is a magic unobservable substance that makes our models correct or that our models need tuning?
That the model needs tuning is already given, because we've got observations that the model can't explain, so there's no "or" about it. The "magic unobservable substance" seems to be the best explanation anyone's been able to come up with so far.
All of it? (Score:2)
The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.
Would these sterile neutrinos be all the dark matter that models hypothesize? Or only one subset of it?
Unless the decay rate is very low, the x-ray flux from something that makes up the majority of the matter in our universe could cook everything nearby.
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Says AC so inept that he cannot begin a sentence with a capitalized word, actually spell "dark matter" or end his sentence with a period.
Not to mention it's a bloody AC who has indicated no level of expertise in physics or cosmology.
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You keep saying that and the next 10' x 10' room will have 50,000 orcs with uzis in it (and a chest with 3 copper pieces).
Not a dark matter signal (Score:1)
It's black sheep, in an interstellar coal mine, with dark matter flashlights.
Asstronomy (Score:1)
Astronomer A: "Do you see anything in the telescope eyepiece?"
Astronomer B: "Nope. Nothing."
Astronomer A: "Yaaay! That means WE discovered Dark Matter!"
Astronomer B: "So, do we get a Nobel?"
Astronomer A: "It already came. Didn't you see it?"
Astronomer B: "Nope."
Astronomer A: "That's because it arrived in a Dark Box."
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That post, especially the first three lines:
Astronomer A: "Do you see anything in the telescope eyepiece?"
Astronomer B: "Nope. Nothing."
Astronomer A: "Yaaay! That means WE discovered Dark Matter!"
could almost have come from a 1950s British radio comedy series "The Goon Show" [wikipedia.org], which might - or might not - mean anything on the western side of the Atlantic: Wikipedia says NBC broadcasted it from the mid-1950s, and that it exercised a considerable influence on the subsequent development of British and Ameri