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Science

Dark Matter Filament Finally Found 190

Posted by samzenpus from the there-it-is dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Everyone is talking about the recent Higgs boson announcement by the scientists at CERN, but another significant scientific discovery was revealed this week as well. In a study published online in the journal Nature on Wednesday, scientists show that they have successfully found the first dark matter filament."
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Dark Matter Filament Finally Found More

Dark Matter Filament Finally Found

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    • Re:Here's a better article... (Score:5, Informative)

      by nickersonm ( 1646933 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:09PM (#40559189)
      Strangely there's no citation of the paper in that article. Here's the arXiv preprint. [arxiv.org]
      • Not so strange. Space.com is one of many more or less hermetically sealed news sites.

        • Not so strange. Space.com is one of many more or less hermetically sealed news sites.

          Not to mention the context ads that I got served with this article:

          What Happens When You Die [RobertLanzaBiocentrism.com]
          New theory says death isn't the end

          How to be a true disciple [www.brunstad.org]
          Think that you can partake of God's own nature - mercy, love, goodness.

          UFOs in the Bible [www.rael.org]
          Crop Circles, UFOs, Religions Get Answers! Free eBook Download.

          I mean...what? Seriously? These are context ads for a scientific article?

  • Futurama fans already know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yosho-sama ( 800703 ) <Yosho.NIN@gmai l . com> on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:25PM (#40558949)
    Futurama fans already know that that filament is a result of Nibblonian diarrhea being ejected into space.
  • what colour are they ?

  • Up next (Score:3)

    by bryan1945 ( 301828 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:34PM (#40559003) Journal

    The dark lightbulb. The darkbulb?

  • well that article sucks (Score:5, Informative)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:35PM (#40559013)
    First of all, don't go to "page 2" and I use that term loosely. Secondly, it doesn't mention a single scientific detail about how they determined that the light was being bent around a filament-shaped object compared to the starts behind it actually being in the location the light suggests. It merely states "They used a model to subtract out the masses of the galaxy clusters and then fit the remaining mass with a model of what a filament might look like. They found that a filament must be present." So in other words, they didn't find anything other than a mathematical equation suggesting dark matter exists. Congratuations are in order indeed.

    • Re:well that article sucks - but read this (Score:5, Informative)

      by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:43PM (#40559063)
      Aha, someone posted a hair bit of time ahead of me a much better article so let me ammend that with the short version:
      There are 2 galaxies kinda far apart but they're really overlapped from Earth's point of view. Like one is almost entirely behind the other. So the back galaxy's light passes along where the filament would be estimated to be between the galaxies. So the light travels through the dark matter's gravitational field for a really long time, running practically parallel to the filament. Even after that much light gravity tugging, it's barely perceptable by our current telescopes. So someone had some pics of this set of galaxies from 2001 but never did anything with them because they didn't realize the opportunity. This new team noticed it, compared it to background light to detect additional possible lensing, and discovered unmistakeable slight lensing. So something is obviously there and it has to be a particular shape, density, and reflect no light.

    • Re:well that article sucks (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lukano ( 50323 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:45PM (#40559069)

      Yeah because 'real' scientists would have hopped in their VW wagon and drove out to the galaxy to test and take measurements and be 100% sure....

      The thing is bazillions of kilometers away, all they have to work with is mathemtical models to provide/disprove theories.

      • Re:well that article sucks (Score:4, Funny)

        by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday July 06, 2012 @02:22AM (#40561081) Homepage Journal

        Volkwagon? VOLKSWAGON?! REAL scientists use police telephone boxes to travel intergalactic distances! Everyone knows that! Only wizards and mad scientists fly by car.

    • Re:well that article sucks (Score:5, Informative)

      by rb12345 ( 1170423 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @07:46PM (#40559075)

      It would have helped if the summary had pointed at the actual Nature article [nature.com] or the ArXiv preprint [arxiv.org].

    • "So in other words, they didn't find anything other than a mathematical equation suggesting dark matter exists. Congratuations are in order indeed."

      Yes, I get a kick out of how that article, as well as the one on space.com linked to above, are both written under the assumption that we know "dark matter" exists... but we know no such thing. It is still a matter of much controversy (no pun intended).

      We have various theories to account for the observations. Among them the most popular of the string theories, which support the existence of dark matter. But on the other hand, there have been a number of recent findings that call "string theory" itself in

      • Re:well that article sucks (Score:4, Interesting)

        by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @02:02AM (#40560973) Homepage Journal

        Yes, I get a kick out of how that article, as well as the one on space.com linked to above, are both written under the assumption that we know "dark matter" exists... but we know no such thing. It is still a matter of much controversy (no pun intended).

        We have various theories to account for the observations. Among them the most popular of the string theories, which support the existence of dark matter. But on the other hand, there have been a number of recent findings that call "string theory" itself into strong question. Perhaps even rendering it invalid.

        Much hinges upon whether the true God particle, the gravitron, really exists. If it does, it would shake up the standard model. If it doesn't, it would shake up the standard model.
        Safest right now is to sometimes believe in it, and treat its existence as as unfalsifiable as God, while having a drink at the multi-dimension (including string theory) bar.

        In short, we are a tad short on understanding how mass and gravity really interact, and the implications. Which dark matter hinges on - both whether and what.

        • Magnets, how do they work? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TapeCutter ( 624760 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @04:48AM (#40561637) Journal
          To parahrase Feynmans answer to magnets, how do they work? [youtube.com] that was taped long before the question became popular.

          At the bottom of every rabbit hole is an explicit assumption. You just have to accept these fundemental assumptions as fact until someone comes along and peels another layer off the onion, assuming there is another layer? You can identify these explicit assumptions fairly easily because they cannot be described by anything more fundemental than themselves therefore all current descriptions of these fundemental properties of the universe are self referencing (or as Feynman put it "cheating"). Dark matter, gravity, spacetime, etc, are examples of these fundemental properties (slashdot challenge: try to come up with a description of a fundemental force or property of the universe that is not self referencing).

          Modern physics accepts that we have no idea how these fundemental properties "work", like the universe itself they "just are". This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes! However all is not lost since we do know a hell of a lot about how these fundemental "miricales' behave, so faith in science is not blind faith, it is a faith that's deeply rooted in the utility of the results. ie: we have labeled our best description of this previously unobserved behaviour of the universe as "dark matter" in a way that is consistent with our current understanding of how the universe behaves.

          Dark matter is therefore simply the label for the description of what we observe. If it suggest new observations via predictions then great, if it gets them right even better, but even though you have leant a lot more about how it behaves, you still don't actually know what dark matter is [youtube.com] ( I particularly like clip for his sly one finger salute to book burning priests at ~2:42).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Hatta ( 162192 )

            science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists"

            Working as if something is true because it has been useful to do so is not the same as having faith. The fact that you can repeat the same experiment as many times as you want, and get the same result is evidence that the real world exists. That's much more support than anything people typically take on faith.

            • I wont arguee over the definition of 'faith', except to say that yours is certainly different from Feyman's, but:

              The fact that you can repeat the same experiment as many times as you want, and get the same result is evidence that the real world exists.

              No, it's not. There is no evidence that the real world exists, and lots of evidence that any such evidence is impossible to get.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Hatta ( 162192 )

                I wont arguee over the definition of 'faith', except to say that yours is certainly different from Feyman's, but:

                Feynman's definition is certainly different than that used by religious folk.

                There is no evidence that the real world exists

                Except for the fact that every time you do an experiment you get the same result. How can that not be evidence for the existence of the real world? Not that it's proof, you can't prove the non-existence of magic.

                and lots of evidence that any such evidence is impossible to

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by radtea ( 464814 )

            This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes!

            The problem with this claim is you're using the same word--"faith"--to describe two completely unrelated things. A belief that the world that exists exists is not faith in the relevant sense. It's either a tautology, or contingent on evidence and therefore subject to change like any other scientific (Bayesian) proposition.

            To a Bayesian--which is to say, a scientist--"faith" describes a particular type of epistemic error: ascribing to a proposition a plausiblity that is strictly 1 or 0. Such a propositio

      • Re:well that article sucks (Score:4, Informative)

        by khayman80 ( 824400 ) * on Friday July 06, 2012 @02:52AM (#40561203) Homepage Journal
        String theory isn't testable using current technology, but it's largely unrelated to dark matter. On the other hand, we've already discussed [slashdot.org] some of the actual evidence for dark matter. This new paper [arxiv.org] seems (to my non-cosmologist eyes) to be very rigorous. Among other checks, they extensively searched parameter space to exclude the possibility that standard NFW dark matter halos were being mistaken as a filament. The nearly head-on alignment of these two galaxies is fortunate, and the authors deserve credit for noting that it improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the gravitational lensing signal.
        • Hi, Khayman80. Haven't heard from you in a while.

          However, there has been much work being done on both "sides" of the matter, and I really don't feel I have time to get into a detailed discussion of the matter right now. But there have recently been findings that seriously call string theory into question, and in turn, that somewhat weakens the arguments for dark matter.

          I'm not saying that anything is conclusive in either direction. But I sense the pendulum swinging...

        • "String theory isn't testable using current technology, but it's largely unrelated to dark matter."

          Apologies, I did not read this quite right the first time, or I would have answered it.

          Yes, indeed, string theory is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed. It may be possible for it to exist without "strings", but in most current models they are inextricably intertwined. I.e., string theory does not depend upon dark matter theory, but dark matter theory (most models, anyway) very much DO depend upon string theory.

          So anything that is evidence against string theory, is also an argum

          • Citation?
            • No, it was about 6 months ago, and I don't have it right at hand. But I will say that if you haven't heard about it, you haven't been paying attention.

              I will look to see if I have a reference. It might take me a day or so. I am very busy with work and personal issues right now.

    • >Congratuations are in order indeed.

      So the only difference with 80 year old computations that this time it's more localized?

  • Okay, so even assuming the light-bending is real, what's their evidence that it's dark matter and not simply non-luminous normal matter? I can see something like the bullet cluster strongly supports dark matter versus alternative theories (e.g. using general relativity rather than Newtonian gravitational theory apparently explains the odd galactic rotational characteristics ) since the vast bulk of matter appears to have passed through without interacting. Then again , should the dark matter have "collide

    • Re:How do they know it's dark matter? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:05PM (#40559165) Journal

      Non-luminous normal matter absorbs light (and so becomes luminous normal matter evenutally, at least at some frequency).

      BTW, the confirmation for dark matter vs other theories for galaxy rotation came from the WMAP [wikipedia.org] data. IIRC, about 80% of the early matter of the universe was shown to be somehting that interacted gravitationally, but did not interact with light (or electrons). The actual % of dark matter measured matched the amount predicted by the dark matter hypothesis for galaxy rotation rates, which is a pretty convincing confirmation IMO.

      • Re:How do they know it's dark matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @09:30PM (#40559603)

        Actually, it generally goes the other way - when a non-star initially forms it will be hot, and has to radiate all that energy away, becoming less bright until it eventually becomes effectively non-luminous. Starlight simply isn't dense enough to significantly heat anything substantially - it will be radiated away as fast as it gets absorbed, and that's *way* below what we can currently detect. Our telescopes may eventually become sensitive to detect such MACHOs directly, but they're not there yet. And micro-lensing studies seem to limit them to comprising roughly the same amount of matter as luminous objects unless they're predominantly >100 solar masses (which would likely tend to be radiant) or less than Moon-sized, in which case there would need to be so many of them that they would likely be passing through the solar system on a fairly regular basis, which we haven't seen.

        If we're talking about stuff in intergalactic filaments though - well, they make interstellar space look positively dense, anything non-luminous would be so close to absolute zero, and so far away, that it would be effectively invisible unless directly in front of something. And it would have to be in a pretty frakking dense cloud to significantly blot out a galaxy Remember that as a wave light will bend around any object in it's path, not much, but slightly (this effect is completely separate from gravitational lensing) and over intergalactic distances that's enough that the "cumulative effects" of a million individual objects each blocking one millionth of the "disc" of a distant galaxy will be far less than you would expect.

        As for galactic rotation and WMAP - there is correlation there, I'll give you that, and when two independent measures give you similar results you should probably sit up and take notice. However, when something like the general-relativity explanation for galactic rotation speeds comes along and says - "Hey, you know that really weird behavior we couldn't explain that made us come up with a really bizarre theory to explain? Well we finally have the computational power to run the analysis using the currently accepted theory of gravity instead of the much simpler but known-flawed centuries old model, and everything works out pretty close to what we actually see." Well, that should make you take notice as well. In fact that should make you sit back and take a long hard look at all your "cosmological gravity weirdness", because most of that happens on a scale where galactic distances look positively local, so you'd expect the discrepancy between instantaneous Newtonian gravity and GR gravity to be even larger.

        Astronomy is a somewhat shaky field - all theories are fundamentally untestable - all you can do is look out at the universe and try to find phenomena that seem to support or counter theory, but in doing so you're making numerous assumptions about what exactly you're looking at to begin with, and assuming it behaves in a manner consistent with other widely accepted but still fundamentally untestable theories. Now that technique is surprisingly effective, but it is vulnerable to flaws in analysis, especially when much analysis is based on something that is known to be inaccurate (Newtonian gravity) because the alternative is too computationally expensive to use.

        • "Well we finally have the computational power to run the analysis using the currently accepted theory of gravity instead of the much simpler but known-flawed centuries old model, and everything works out pretty close to what we actually see."

          Sounds like you are referring to MOND, or something like it?

          • No, just a straightforward use of the GR equations of gravity rather than the known-flawed Newtonian ones. The Newtonian ones don't even describe the motion of Mercury accurately, and the velocities involved in galactic rotation are considerably higher (~225km/s versus Mercury's 48km/s).

            I believe this was the article: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507619/ [arxiv.org]

            • Oh, and MOND is referring to slight changes in the Newtonian equations of gravity (it's right there in the name), and since we now know Newtonian gravity is at best a convenient first-order approximation that has already been supplanted by General Relativity, which is both widely accepted and far more accurate, it seems to me that MOND is very much a matter of putting lipstick on a pig. You don't try to explain bizarre phenomena at extreme scales in terms of a theory that everyone already agrees is bunk.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Astronomy is a somewhat shaky field - all theories are fundamentally untestable - all you can do is look out at the universe and try to find phenomena that seem to support or counter theory, but in doing so you're making numerous assumptions about what exactly you're looking at to begin with, and assuming it behaves in a manner consistent with other widely accepted but still fundamentally untestable theories. Now that technique is surprisingly effective, but it is vulnerable to flaws in analysis, especially when much analysis is based on something that is known to be inaccurate (Newtonian gravity) because the alternative is too computationally expensive to use.

          Makes me feel better about studying Economics

    • Easy, the sampled it (Score:5, Funny)

      by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:18PM (#40559225)

      And it turned out that it was made of what we long suspected the mising mass of the universe wa composed of: AOL discs.

  • These people are just not up on the classics. (Score:5, Funny)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:02PM (#40559155)

    Dark Matter was proven decades ago as this following article demonstrates.

    Bell Labs Proves Existence of Dark Suckers

    For years it has been believed that electric bulbs emitted light. However, recent information from Bell Labs has proven otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light, they suck dark. Thus they now call these bulbs dark suckers. The dark sucker theory, according to a Bell Labs spokesperson, proves the existence of dark, that dark has mass heavier than that of light, and that dark is faster than light.

    The basis of the dark sucker theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. Take for example, the dark suckers in the room where you are. There is less dark
    right next to them than there is elsewhere. The larger the dark sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark suckers in a parking lot have a
    much greater capacity than the ones in this room. As with all things, dark suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the black spot on a full dark sucker. A candle is a primitive dark sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You will notice that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark which
    has been sucked into it. If you hold a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, the tip will turn black because it got in the path of the dark flowing into the candle.

    Unfortunately, these primitive dark suckers have a very limited range. There are also portable dark suckers. The bulbs in these can't handle all
    of the dark by themselves, and must be aided by a dark storage unit. When the dark storage unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before
    the portable dark sucker can operate again.

    Dark has mass. When dark goes into a dark sucker, friction from this mass generates heat. Thus it is not wise to touch an operating dark sucker.
    Candles present a special problem, as the dark must travel in the solid wick instead of through glass. This generates a great amount of heat. Thus it can be very dangerous to touch an operating candle. Dark is also heavier than light. If you swim deeper and deeper, you notice it gets slowly darker
    and darker. When you reach a depth of approximately fifty feet, you are in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats to the top. The immense power of dark can be utilized to mans advantage. We can collect the dark that has settled to the bottom of lakes and push it through turbines, which generate electricity and help push it to the ocean where it may be safely stored.
    Prior to turbines, it was much more difficult to get dark from the rivers and lakes to the ocean. The Indians recognized this problem, and tried to
    solve it. When on a river in a canoe travelling in the same direction as the flow of the dark, they paddled slowly, so as not to stop the flow of dark, but when they traveled against the flow of dark, they paddled quickly so as to help push the dark along its way.

    Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in an illuminated room in front of a closed, dark closet, then slowly open the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet, but since the dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.

    In conclusion, Bell Labs stated that dark suckers make all our lives much easier. So the next time you look at an electric bulb remember that it is indeed a dark sucker.

    • Re:These people are just not up on the classics. (Score:5, Funny)

      by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:18PM (#40559223)

      I don't know if I believe you about the dark suckers, but I know how to prove that Dark Matter exists - just redirect one of the mars probes to go visit this dark matter filament and bring back a sample. The Curiosity Rover already has a drill, which would aid in extracting the matter. It should be a simple matter of stellar mathematics (provided that we're willing to wait a bit longer) to set it on a course to the filament. On the way there the rover can be reprogrammed to autonomously land and extract the matter. Since it will be a bit further from Earth than it was designed for, it might be out of radio contact so it will have to be self sufficient.

      Easy-peasy, in a "few" years we could be examining samples from this dark filament here on earth.

  • Bigger than the Higgs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:26PM (#40559273)

    I'd call this bigger than the Higgs.

    • Another type of matter that differs in that it doesn't absorb or emit light, but is detected by the effects of its mass, is bigger than the particle that implements mass itself? A type of matter is bigger than the the instance of a fundamental parameter of existence? No it's not.

      • The photon is the carrier of the EM field, and the electron has mass while the photon doesn't. The Higgs doesn't "implement mass"; it is what we get if we manage to create a collision sufficiently energetic that a carrier of the Higgs field pops detectably into and out of existence, just as the photon pops into and out of existence if we accelerate a charge sufficiently to create a local distortion of the EM field.

        The top quark has a mass of about 173GeV, which comfortably beats the 125 of the particle dete

    • "I'd call this bigger than the Higgs."

      I'm not really sure about the scales here, but just off the top of my head, you could probably call this bigger than the Higgs by around 30 orders of magnitude.

  • In a world where people are only comforted by thinking they understand how the universe works I'm totally fascinated by the unexplainable. It boggles my mind that people couldn't believe in 'invisible' mass. Furthermore, I look forward to what organisms may exist in that phase. Maybe Deadmau5's got it. Ghosts n stuff.

    • "It boggles my mind that people couldn't believe in 'invisible' mass."

      It should not boggle your mind, at all. Because it's not a matter of "belief" at all. It is a matter of evidence. And conclusive evidence is not there.

      There are MANY very smart people who "believe" in that invisible mass. But they, themselves, know that belief is not the measure by which their work will be judged.

  • This is actually far more important (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @08:39PM (#40559351) Journal
    Higgs was pretty much a given. All that CERN did was confirm it. OTOH, Dark matter occupies a large amount of the universe and yet, we have not found it. So, the question is, is this real?

    • Re:This is actually far more important (Score:5, Informative)

      by b4dc0d3r ( 1268512 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @12:03AM (#40560485)

      Un-doing 7 well-deserved mod points to post this, so pay attention. Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility. The team explicitly stated that further confirmation is needed before they can say they found Higgs, or a Higgs-sized particle that does not do the things Higgs Boson is supposed to do.

      It is still up in the air as to whether we have a Higgs Boson, or a Higgs-less theory of mass. Obviously everyone is leaning towards Higgs because it matches predictions. But what if it is Higgs sized without having the correct properties? Then you're wrong, and also an idiot for assuming it is a given.

      If we indeed found it, then you're a lucky guess at best.

      I agree this is more important, but only because we have been zeroing in on a Higgs-sized particle for quite some time. Dark matter has been purely theoretical until now (and still this is only the first sighting, subject to review and revision as with all experimental results). More important because it's newer.

      In truth, we won't know for a hundred years which is more important. If dark matter has been theorized since 1930's and we just confirmed it, it is no more important than such ideas as gravitational lensing which have been around for decades before being confirmed. We have known it for a long time, in other words. To me, more important would be strong evidence that a 90 year old hypothesis was completely incorrect and in need of revision.

      Neither one of these, to me, beats a fat man finally seeing his toes after 30 years. He had a feeling they were there, and had been told as much, but to finally see them is a whole different ball game.

      • "Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility."

        Thank you! You have just confirmed what I stated in the Higgs thread, for which I was modded "troll" more than once.

        They Rolf Heuer said they are 5-sigma confident that they found a particle, which so far seems consistent with predictions about the Higgs. That is not the same thing as crying to the heavens that the Higgs has been found.

      • Re:This is actually far more important (Score:4, Interesting)

        by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @02:14AM (#40561043) Homepage Journal

        Un-doing 7 well-deserved mod points to post this, so pay attention. Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility.

        Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a pairing between a Z and W boson was also considered a candidate.

        And also if assuming the Higgs' boson, the question was whether it was in the 120-130 GeV or in the ~182 GeV range - the energy difference could have significant impacts on the standard model, especially in higher order Higgs (when it interacts with itself), but also in how rare the sub-particle would be, and in predicting where to find the last couple of missing particles (not counting the elusive Gravitron).
        All in all, the LHC discovery, although predicted, is a great discovery that will give physicists data they sorely needed.

        Dark matter? Not so much. We know there are unobservable gravitational effects, but we can't currently say what they are even if we can point to a place where they are. Nailing the Higgs' boson may, in the future, help with this, but not yet.

        • "Dark matter? Not so much. We know there are unobservable gravitational effects, but we can't currently say what they are even if we can point to a place where they are. Nailing the Higgs' boson may, in the future, help with this, but not yet."

          Haha! I seem to have suddenly stumbled upon a couple of people on Slashdot who actually THINK!

          I was beginning to think they were a real rarity.

  • Our Universe Makes My Brain Hurt (Score:5, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @09:57PM (#40559781) Homepage Journal
    It's like a sophomore project in universe design class. A way-too-slow hard-coded top speed, lots of localized buffer overflows without proper error handling or anything (Too much mass in one place should at LEAST throw an exception,) particles popping in and out of existence all the time, and the whole thing is held together by duck tape and dark matter. Honestly, I might give this universe a "C"... if I was feeling generous.

    • Another case of the professor's inability to understand his subject lowering an inventive student's grade.

    • So, you go tell the student that, the guy is unstable in the extreem! Wiped out an entire planet just because people wouldn't listen to him. Imagine what he do with a professor that gives him a C. Would be a sight to see. Preferably from another universe.

  • Good for them (Score:4, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @10:45PM (#40560095) Journal

    Dark Matter Filament Finally Found

    Now maybe they can help me find my keys.

  • Dark Energy? (Score:3)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday July 05, 2012 @11:01PM (#40560175) Homepage Journal

    Some explanations of dark matter say that most of the gravitational effects are from dark energy, not condensed into matter. But if dark matter differs from other matter in that it doesn't absorb or emit light, how does dark energy differ from other energy? Energy doesn't absorb or emit light, so how is dark energy different? Unless they mean that it doesn't get absorbed or emitted as light, the way other energy does (ie. photon beams). Without that property it seems rather unlike other energy, enough that it's not really energy.

    And if it is dark energy, then where is all the cold, dark info? The next more subtle form of existants.

  • Normally, all known chemical elements reflect light in one degree or another...so, what is this dark matter made of? what is its chemical composition?

  • Dark Matter Filament (Score:4, Funny)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Friday July 06, 2012 @07:43AM (#40562517)

    Is it something like that thing in Star Trek Generations ?

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