The Starry Sky Just Got Starrier 186
An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have surveyed eight elliptical galaxies, and found that we've vastly underestimated the number of dim red dwarf stars in these giant galaxies. When they used the new number of red dwarfs in their calculations, they tripled the total number of known stars in the universe."
first? or third? (Score:3, Interesting)
dark matter much?
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dark matter much?
Apparently less :)
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Of course working on the assumption that Dark Matter even exists. Unless I am mistaken there is no actual direct evidence to its existence and it is used mostly to explain phenomena not fully understood. It may be the modern equivalent of luminiferous ether and disproved in the future.
Well, there's the classic Bullet Cluster [wikipedia.org]. There's something that bends light but is otherwise completely invisible. It's not necessarily dark matter, but other explanations sound even more far-fetched.
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effect does this discovery have on the current estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe?
The what?
The term "dark matter" on its own, unless you an scientist using it in a specific context, is not meaningful. When a layperson uses it as you have it is meaningless.
You have to specify which dark matter you mean. There is "missing matter" at all distance scales above some relatively modest threshold, but there are quite different constraints on what it might be depending on the scale you're observing.
When anti-scientific nutjobs on /. bitch out the purported arrogance of scientists who postulate "
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Good question. Assuming you are asking something along the lines of "How does this finding effect the ratio of dark to regular matter?" My guess is, not much, because I don't think the ratio ever really depended on observations of stars, per se.
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? I thought that they used gravity to determine the approximate mass of the galaxy, and then subtracted the amount of visible matter to yield the amount of dark matter. If that's how they did it, then increasing the amount of visible matter would have to decrease the amount of dark matter.
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Minor corrections:
- Not only the visual spectrum, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
- Black holes are also added to the baryonic matter count, and their masses are estimated based on their effect on observable matter. For faraway objects, one can assume that the number and sizes of black holes compared to visible matter is lower than the ratio in our neighbourhood, simply because faraway galaxies are much younger, giving black holes less time to appear and grow.
Anyhow, I see this as good news for our
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Informative)
They don't determine the mass of a galaxy by counting stars.
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You are correct, but the amount of dark matter figured in this way was roughly four times the amount of visible matter. A full tripling of visible matter (which is not what happened - these are teeny tiny stars, which is why they were missed before) would only set dark and visible matter roughly equal to each other.
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Teeny tiny is a relative term.
Up to 40% of the mass of the our sun is the usually quoted cut off for red dwarfs. That is still a pretty sizable object.
Two or three of these add up to our sun.
An interesting visual of relative solar system masses is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size [wikipedia.org]
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I'm afraid your referential opacity places you squarely in the realm of dim matter.
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FTFA:
Elliptical galaxies posed a problem: The motions of the stars they contained implied that they had more mass than one would get by adding the mass of the normal matter astronomers observed to the expected amount of dark matter in the neighborhood. Some suggested that the ellipticals somehow had extra dark matter associated with them. Instead, the newly detected red dwarfs could account for the difference, van Dokkum says.
So this doesn't really decrease the amount of dark matter in the universe. It simply shores up the anomalous hypothesized excess of dark matter observed for elliptical galaxies in comparison with spirals.
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, last I heard it was 5 to 1. So those tiny stars and any rocks orbiting them could have a bigger impact on those numbers than you think.
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Informative)
Five to one or twenty to one, you still have a significant amount of mass.
Then, as you mention, you have to add all the hard to detect planets for another small fraction. (If weren't seeing the star you can bet they weren't measuring its wobble). Admittedly its probably a small addition relative to the stars themselves.
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Darn it, modded you down, meant to mod you up, and the mod thang disappears after modding, so it can no longer be fixed. So, posting to undo the mod. Bloody broken slash-code.
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Rocks that orbit the stars are irrelevant for the purposes of mass calculation. All the mass in our solar system that isn't the Sun or Jupiter is less than Jupiter. Jupiter's mass is less than 1/1000th of the Sun's. Granted, our solar system may not be representative of other star systems, I bet it would be. Due to the process of stellar formation, there's always a shit-ton more Hydrogen and Helium than anything else.
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Informative)
It probably depends on what you're talking about really, from WP:
dark matter accounts for 23% of the mass-energy density of the observable universe, while the ordinary matter accounts for only 4.6% (the remainder is attributed to dark energy).[2] From these figures, dark matter constitutes 80% of the matter in the universe, while ordinary matter makes up only 20%.
So ordinary matter accounts for 4.6% (1/20th) of all mass+energy in the universe - this I suppose has to do with Einstein's E=mc2 that allows for mass to be converted to energy and the other way around. And looking at actual mass, not taking the energy into account, this would end up at 1/5th. So both numbers are in a way correct, depending on context. I thought actually it was about 90% dark matter, so let's call that number the average. Then at least I'm not wrong myself.
Now I don't really know what they mean with the "dark energy" part or how that's measured, the "dark matter" I understand somewhat as it has to do with gravity.
Anyway this whole "dark matter" thing sounds to me like the hypothetical "aether" - we don't know what it is so make up something to make the formulas work. So now we found that there is 3-4 times as much "visible" matter in our universe than we thought before. Oh well that's quite some "dark matter" that has come to light. I'm quite sure the rest will follow sooner or later.
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You're way off.
Aesther theories were never "place-holders". Sure, the name was conjured up to describe some unobserved material, but it was very much meant to be a viable explanation of the world, on-par with Newtonian physics.
Secondly, dark matter is not some made up theory, it is very literally a place-holder that exists to indicate that there is an u
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Dark energy is some form of "stuff" that is pushing the universe apart, somehow. Saw that in the same show, and I don't know much more about it. And yes, dark energy is about 3/4 of the mass of the known universe, and dark matter is about 80% of the remaining 25%.
By the way, they've built a sensor for dark matter, as it does pass through objects, but not without affecting them with gravity. Which causes the molecules of objects they pass through to vibrate. Heat. And they use that to measure it.
They've had
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From Popular Science [popsci.com] you can read:
" 'Within these galaxies, a good chunk of the mass that had been ascribed to dark matter is probably stars,' said Pieter van Dokkum, the lead researcher on the project."
So I bet "a good chunk of the mass" is a bit more than "a minor change".
But we will probably soon get an exact new ratio after the smart guys have made new calculations, other than any of the above.
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Bah.
Postulating Dark {Matter, Energy} is the height of hubris, since it implies that Astronomy Has Seen All There Is To See from our tiny little glasses on our tiny little rock in a backwater arm of the Galaxy.
Thank The FSM that there are still a few rational scientists out there actually *looking* for stuff.
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Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coinc
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Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coincide with their ideas. A lot of things look good on paper as theory and then completely disintegrate when applied to the real world.
String theory is the mathematical/logical synthesis of theories. As such, it can only predict what the logical closure of its sub-theories predict.
String theory cannot make any new testable hypothe
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Because it is them, taken together, and expressed in a unified mathematical framework.
Don't you mean it's most of them, with small but important bits missing?
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It's just the opposite, Dark Matter is something we know we haven't seen, yet. It is a way to measure the "unexplored".
It's like saying that I know that of 20 persons in this room I can see 5 (and I can describe them).
If I have some way of knowing (gravity for example) that it must be equal to 20 persons, I can call the missing persons Dark People. They might be 15 normal people, its just that they are behind stuff (my self for example) so I cant see them straight on. I might catch a glimpse in a reflective
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Just because you can't see the other 15 people, doesn't mean that you wouldn't see them if you had an IR camera.
Before Van Dokkum wrote his paper, the DM/DE proponents thought they'd found all the matter there is to find. Suddenly there's 3x more. Which is a slight reduction in the need for DM.
Who's to say that in 1-20 years other heretics find 10x more baryonic matter, thus reducing even more the necessity for DM.
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Informative)
Dark matter and dark energy are two totally different things. They're placeholders for vastly different phenomena. Dark matter explains why galaxies rotate at the speeds they do, even though their visible mass is much, MUCH, lower than the spinning speed shows it should be. Dark energy is the pressure that's causing the universe to accelerate outward. The universe isn't just expanding, the rate of the expansion is increasing, not decreasing as you would expect. Some force is being exerted on the fabric of the universe that's causing it to expand at a faster rate every second.
So, to recap:
Dark matter = mass that's causing galaxies to spin faster than they should be
Dark energy = force that's pushing the universe apart
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And finally, matter == energy, for anyone who wasn't confused already
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Insightful)
Before Van Dokkum wrote his paper, the DM/DE proponents thought they'd found all the matter there is to find.
No astronomer thought they had found all the normal matter there is to find. In fact the search for dim red dwarfs in specific was part of trying to answer the Dark Matter mystery -- which originally only meant matter we had not seen yet, and only came to mostly refer to non-Baryonic Dark Matter when observations suggested that most of it was.
In fact, would you believe that when "DM Proporents" estimated the amount of non-Baryonic matter and added it to the known visible matter in galaxies, they still saw a discrepancy in observed gravity in elliptical galaxies? And that finding more normal matter was one prediction to explain it, and in fact this new observation may end up explaining the difference, solidifying our calculations of dark matter.
Suddenly there's 3x more. Which is a slight reduction in the need for DM.
3x the stars is not 3x the mass (particularly when the discovered stars are red dwarfs), but regardless...
Who's to say that in 1-20 years other heretics find 10x more baryonic matter, thus reducing even more the necessity for DM.
Indeed, who's to say? But as long as there are observations that cannot be explained by baryonic matter, it will be necessary.
I really like the characterization of this researcher as a "heretic", btw. I like it because this "heretic" was given access to the Keck Interferometer -- the combination of two of the largest telescopes in the world and thus a highly sought-after instrument -- in order to conduct his research. And then said research was published in Nature.
Because that's how we do things in science: we invite the "heretics" to make observations and disprove our current theories and hypothesis so we can create even better ones. They are not shunned, they are not shut out from access to the tools they would need to prove themselves,. Quite the opposite. Indeed, quite the opposite of a "Church" and "heretic" relationship. Which is why it's funny.
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Sorry man, but your "it's all baryonic matter" hypothesis doesn't explain the Bullet Cluster [wikipedia.org]. Feel free to try again when you can explain it using only baryonic matter, though - that should be interesting!
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That reminds me. There's a few wags at my institution who like to send examples to a certain mailing list of kookie religious people being kookie. Someone posted a discussion on a Christian web site of some fundamentalist "physicists" talking about how the reason regular physicists had to invent dark matter is because they weren't taking into account the mass of Heaven and Hell.
I am not making this up. When I get time I'll try to find the link and I'll post it to a journal here. Some of you
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Insightful)
Postulating Dark {Matter, Energy} is the height of hubris, since it implies that Astronomy Has Seen All There Is To See from our tiny little glasses on our tiny little rock in a backwater arm of the Galaxy.
Thank The FSM that there are still a few rational scientists out there actually *looking* for stuff.
There are observations that have been made which cannot be explained by any quantity of unseen "regular" aka Baryonic matter. This is the result of people actually looking for stuff, and not in their hubris assuming that we have Seen All There Is To See. Indeed it is very much a case of realizing that we have not seen it all.
Hubris is dismissing (the non-Baryonic subset of) Dark Matter because it's not the same as the "regular" matter we are familiar with in a much more extreme case of assuming we have Seen All There Is To See. Red dwarfs are nothing new; and you're strongly implying you think such examples of normal objects will explain away the need for Dark Matter, as in we won't find anything new. We Have Seen It All.
Even though what astronomers have seen strongly suggests that is not true, and there is stuff out there completely different than what you are comfortable with.
It is kinda funny how often people give "arrogance" as the reason why scientists put forward certain hypothesis when they are completely unaware of the actual scientific reasoning behind the hypothesis. By attributing arrogance to others as a consequence of their own ignorance, they demonstrate tremendous hubris.
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"But there’s still plenty of dark matter, too, according to van Dokkum. In fact, the new stars probably won’t change the accounting of dark matter very much."
But hey, look at me being lazy and just quoting the article you cited.
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You're ignoring something important. The laws of conservation of matter and energy.
These are stars that went supernova, but for which the remaining gravitationally bound matter did not turn into a black hole. It takes a lot of matter for a star to nova, and it doesn't just disappear.
In short, they tripled the number of stars that were at one time on the order of 10 times more massive than average.
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Nevermind, I'm wrong about red dwarves.
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In a word, no. Supernovas that don't turn into black holes end up as neutron stars, not red dwarfs. Red dwarfs are the remains of stars too small to go supernova, which is why they're so small.
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Funny)
Important to you, maybe...
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Good question. Assuming you are asking something along the lines of "How does this finding effect the ratio of dark to regular matter?" My guess is, not much, because I don't think the ratio ever really depended on observations of stars, per se.
What was the need for there to be dark matter in the first place? Wasn't it invented as a concept to explain why the universe is the way it is assuming it has a specific amount of stars in it? Has anyone proven that dark matter exists or is it just a convenient kludge to make a model of the universe fit observations?
If they discovered that there are 3 times as many stars as previously believed then what purpose does the concept of dark matter serve?
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Non-baryonic dark matter has to exist in order for certain observations made on the cosmic background radiation to make sense. Basically, the Big Bang couldn't have happened without it. There's a lot more to it than just missing mass.
As for evidence, there's enough to infer it exists, but its exact composition remains elusive, so far as I know with my layman's understanding of this stuff.
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The best evidence is that, by observing galaxy rotations, it seemed like the galaxies needed to be about 80% dark matter for the rotations to make sense (there were several competing theories at that point). Then the CMBR observations pegged the composition of the universe at that early time at about 80% dark matter. The unrealted theories agreed to a couple of significant digits, which pretty much settled the matter (as much as anything in cosmology can ever be known).
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It is something more along the lines of this: We have a good number of formulas and calculations that work properly with the things we can measure - planets, the sun, cars, planes, kitchen scales. One of these might be:
y + 3 = 5
Nice and simple for this example. Lets say that the "y" here represents gravity and the formula has been proven in every experiment we have done.
We therefore as
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So why was it wrong for Einstein to add Cosmological Fudge Factor X to the equation, but not for us? How do we know, or what makes us think, that the missing matter is non-baryonic in nature?
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The reason we think think it is non-baryonic is because we simply haven't fo
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Well, considering that nothing in our physics confirms that the big bang even COULD have happened, I'm pretty comfortable with not assuming invisible things exist to back up an hypothesis that isn't possible under normal physics anyway. The big bang is just hand-waving at this point in time.
Ascribing it the status of certainty is the result of not consuming the available objective facts, in particular that the states described for the importan
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big bang is just hand-waving at this point in time.
Hand-waving, one of the most successfully predictive theories [xkcd.com] of the last century, these are both the same. I'll make them seem like they're both the same by... wait for it... waving my hands.
Seriously? and opinion moderation abuse too? (Score:3)
[rollseyes] Oh, please. Horizon problem? Doppler problem? CMBR problem (well, two of them, really)? Anti-matter problem? Dark matter / energy fudge factor / problems? Large scale void problem? Speaking of fudge, inflation? Really? Distant young galaxy problem? And the really big one, the singularity: BB theory doesn't actually oblige us by conforming to what we know about physics. It's just a math model, and it looks a good deal more l
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Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Interesting)
> True, Dark Matter, like Dark Energy, is just a placeholder name for something that we _think_ is there.
FTFY.
Probably will get modded down, but if you "knew" it, then you would be able to prove it exists. Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it, therefore it is a mathematical kludge, aka, the aether of the 1900s. (Yes, I'm aware of http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html [nasa.gov] )
Ergo, while said more politely, "it falls out of the math", which will allthough appear quite reasonable at first, given the current limitations of understanding gravity / light / mass & energy, it is still one a big hack-job based on one assumption after another, namely:
a) that there is only one type of gravity and
b) gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
c) redshift is accurate (ARP has interesting evidence that calls into question this assumption)
This prof. provides a half-decent summary though:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph123/lec08.html [uoregon.edu]
Re:first? or third? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since they can make predictions with it, and have tons a data supporting there is an effect going on, you're wrong.
"Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it."
the same can be said for gravity.
Now if you added 'measured it' then it couldn't be said for gravity. Of course then it couldn't be said for dark energy and dark matter.
a) There is no evidence of any other kind. Should some good evidence actually come in, then great.
b) Every measurement we have made using our understanding of gravity seems consistent. Again, if there is actual evidence of something else, then thing will change.
c) interesting evidences doesn't matter, strong* evidence does.
Your post shows a large amount of ignorance on this matter, and ignorance on the scientific process.
*no pun intended.
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There always needs to be a sufficient amount of skepticism to everything we devise. Dark matter really is aether. We don't know what it is, we can't observe it so far, the only thing we know is the effects it does. However, interesting theories (such as Hoava–Lifshitz gravity [wikipedia.org]) have sprung up that try to explain the effects we see withou
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"Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it."
the same can be said for gravity.
Really? Where do you live? I feel gravity constantly.
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> Since they can make predictions with it, and have tons a data supporting there is an effect going on, you're wrong.
Um, no.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13280 [newscientist.com]
Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's out there. Things like the bullet cluster pretty much prove that there must be large amounts of some sort of weakly interacting matter. Basically, two galaxies collide. Normal matter in one galaxy interacts with normal mater in the other, slowing it down. But something massive wasn't slowed down and kept right on trucking along the same path at the same speed as before. We only know it is there because of the gravitational lensing it produces. So, we have direct evidence of matter that we can not see, and that does not interact with other stuff except through gravity. Call it whatever you like, it's out there. And that is just one piece of evidence. Galaxy rotation and the CMB are others.
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Call it whatever you like
How about "really dim baryonic matter". After all, we're Really, Really Far Away.
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Really dim baryonic matter would only explain some of the many different lines of evidence.
I don't really have a horse in this race, I mean, I could care less which theory turns out to be correct. It just seems like the preponderance of evidence points to a non-baryonic source of mass at this point.
Re: first? or third? (Score:2)
I don't really have a horse in this race, I mean, I could care less which theory turns out to be correct.
Me neither. But it really seems odd that so many Slashdotters are so rabidly against the idea of dark matter.
Re: first? or third? (Score:4, Interesting)
Me neither. But it really seems odd that so many Slashdotters are so rabidly against the idea of dark matter.
The story of humanity is full of whole chapters which basically boil down to a bright spark being smothered by a bunch of ignorant fuckwads attached to their idea of how the world works. Every once in a great while the spark lands in a pile of tinder not in the furnace-equipped basement of a firetrap and something wonderful is born, but mostly people shun what they don't understand and it's their children or their children's children who are willing to incorporate it into their lives as an escape from the previous generation who doesn't "get it". This is why the technological singularity is the religion most appealing to the technological elite...
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The story of humanity is full of whole chapters which basically boil down to a bright spark being smothered by a bunch of ignorant fuckwads attached to their idea of how the world works. Every once in a great while the spark lands in a pile of tinder not in the furnace-equipped basement of a firetrap and something wonderful is born, but mostly people shun what they don't understand and it's their children or their children's children who are willing to incorporate it into their lives as an escape from the previous generation who doesn't "get it". This is why the technological singularity is the religion most appealing to the technological elite...
But perhaps just as much due to the ratio of crackpots to revolutionary scientific insight as the fuckwads. Ok, the world has sometimes been in a "burn them at the stake" mode but most of the time it's just lack of sufficiently compelling evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it's often reasonable to assume that you've simply done something wrong or ignored some parts that didn't make sense but still punt your pet theory anyway.
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Or things like the Bullet Cluster prove that we don't understand gravity nearly as well as we think we do.
Put simply: two things interact, but don't conform to our expectations of how they should interact. Therefore:
1. Our expectations must be wrong.
or
2. There must be something we're not seeing about the interaction.
Dark Matter is basically saying "2, because our expectations seem to pan out for other interactions"
But then...Dark Energy...
Put simply: two things interact at very long distances, but don't con
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gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
It would be, except that our observations of the effects of gravity cover countless measurements over the entire observable universe.
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IANOP, but this galaxy is 90% dark matter is just another way of saying that the amount of matter visible to us as stars and interstellar gas is dreadfully insufficient to account for how this galaxy rotates, even if we generously account for very dim collapsed stars and stellar black holes, for as many of them as we think have appeared since the Big Bang. Either General Relativity is wrong on a galactic scale, or there is a crap-ton of matter hanging out there that does not produce, block, or reflect any
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Re:first? or third? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe this [wikipedia.org] is one piece of very strong evidence for some sort of pervasive weakly interacting massive stuff. Two galaxies collide. The normal matter interacts with other normal matter and slows down, The "other stuff" does not interact, and keeps moving. We know it is there because it creates a gravitational lens. If the lensing were caused by any sort of matter that interacted with other matter, these lenses would not be located where they are.
So the theory of Dark Matter is more than just "there is more stuff than we can see." We can see specific phenomenon that normal matter just can not produce.
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Your incorrectly summarize your own cite.
Two galaxies collide. The stars are slowed by gravity but mostly go on their way, the gasses collide and slow down while emitting X-rays, some other stuff does not interact and keeps moving.We know it is there because it creates a gravitational lens. That lens is detected in the same place as the visible stars but has no observable light.
Further from your cite
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Sorry, got the bit wrong about the stars. But how could cold gas clouds not smash into each other? And why does this observation match up with so many others that also show the existence of dark matter? Critics like to take each piece of evidence separately, and cast doubt on each one, but they rarely seem to want to take on the whole package of evidence at once.
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The extra mass could simply be a much larger black hole in the incoming galaxy that had previously consumed most of it's surrounding matter. There's just too much that isn't known here to draw firm conclusions about anything.
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Sorry, I didn't realize anything significant depended on "impressing" you. Someone forgot to pass me the memo. Let me see, am I impressed by your post? No, looks like you didn't even understand what I said, so I guess... no worries. You just go right on with your unimpressed self, there. Isn't life fun?
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So this "other stuff" is there, does not interact with itself, but does interact with OTHER matter (light in this case) to create a gravity lens?
I may miss something but to me it seems to contradict. How can its gravity interact with light, but not with itself or the non-dark matter in those colliding galaxies? If it produces that much gravity to create a gravitational lens, why doesn't it pull the rest of the galaxy with it?
Dark matter interacts or it doesn't. It holds galaxies together, creates gravitat
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The galaxy rotation problem is basically this: Stars towards the edge of galaxies (mainly spiral galaxies) rotate much faster than they should based on Newtonian gravitation using only the visible material (the Einstein corrections are negligible at the speeds and distances being talked about, so they can't account for the differences). To explain this, you have basically two options: MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (ie., changing the laws of the universe at large distance scales like kiloparsecs), or dar
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Not quite. It's just matter we haven't seen and so can't account for, if we have the mass estimates for the universe right, which is in itself doubtful. For instance, a small galaxy directly behind a large one in a position that doesn't allow us to see it -- that's "dark" from the dark matter point of view, even though it's glowing like crazy. Some of it might not be radiating, or radiating too dimly
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It won't boost as much as you think. It increases the number of stars, but red dwarfs are small and not very massive. They are usually stars that went nova but were too small to collapse and form a black hole.
A handful of super-massive black holes could probably cover this tripling of the stars.
Even if the amount of matter tripled, however, it still would not eliminate dark matter. Currently, visible matter accounts for 4.6% of the matter in the observable universe. Dark matter accounts for 23% (the res
My god . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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How many library of congresses is that?
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Three times as many as before.
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congressmen can't read, duh.
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congressmen can't read, duh.
this one can: brazilian clown
In this case at least, the jury is still out.
The article you quoted is full of inaccuracies. For one thing, "Tiririca" does not mean "Grumpy", that would be "Zangado" in Portuguese. "Tiririca"is the name of a common garden weed in Brazil.
More importantly, the judge mentioned there did not rule that Tiririca is able to read and write, he ruled that the candidate was not guilty of perjury just because he did not fill out himself the document stating that he's able to read and write.
Perhaps the Washington Post
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No, spelled that way, it's more likely an adult book/movie rental house. Different kind of "congress".
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Even so, I'd say there are still billions and billions [youtube.com] of them.
"We have always been space travelers [youtube.com]." - Carl Sagan
Re: My god . . . (Score:2)
It's full of three times the stars.
And that song about Van Gogh should have started "Starry, starry, starry, starry, starry, starry night".
More red dwarfs? (Score:3)
The Chirpsithra will be thrilled.
Re: (Score:2)
So, how many more ears do I need to cut off? (Score:2)
Ah, Starry Night
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starry_night [wikipedia.org] )
I only had two . . .
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, this discovery shows just how incompetent a painter he was. There should have been three times as many swirlies. Or maybe he was just lazy. Anyway, I'm sure others will chalk it up to 'artistic license' rather than out their favorite painter as the fraud that he was.
Re: (Score:2)
He wasn't a fraud. He just had lousy eyesight.
Oh my GOD! (Score:3)
it's more full of stars!
Re: (Score:2)
First, a poster doesn't recognize a Spam skit parody, now a 2001: A Space Odyssey reference? This damned site has been overrun with jocks!
hmm, still can't see them. (Score:3)
Nice, more stars.
can't wait to take my telescope out and look at them.
wait, what?
hmmm (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> What does this mean for the mass of the Universe?
Nothing. It just means that more of the baryonic matter is in the form of dim red dwarf stars than we previously had estimated.
Have we made sure that... (Score:2)
.
OMG! (Score:2)
It's full of stars!
avagadros number (Score:2)
is getting tantalizingly close. Ok, half way to go, but maybe there are more eliptical galaxies.
The pot heads would be insufferable.
estimates vs. observations (Score:2)
It seems to me that this discovery yielded a change in the calculated number of stars in the universe, while doing next to nothing about "the total number of known stars in the universe".
Can't cope with the scale (Score:3)
The human mind just can't really cope with large numbers. The universe is just so shockingly enormous, on the order of 10^80 atoms.
However, this is a tiny number in comparison with others. The number of possible chess games is on the order of 10^123. You'd have to encode 100000000000000000000000000000000000000 games of chess into a single atom to store every possible game.
Of course, you'd need 10^183,800 monkeys to write Hamlet on the first go.
These number all seem the same to me though, on the same order of 10^50 (number of atoms on the earth)
Re: (Score:3)
To say the sky got 'starrier' would imply that more stars are there than before...
No, it means there are more stars than we knew about before.