Doer
Well-Known Member
I get bored in meetings and read this stuff, instead. Must be a pretty boring meeting, right? 
Dark Matter, recently an observation of funny rotation in galaxy formations and now perhaps directly observed through our old friend the Space Warp. Gravity Lens.
Now, this idea is not in the article, but it occurs to me the problem with using gravity lens to see stuff is, the big mass in the middle. What if the big mass in the middle was invisible? With visible mass accumulated, lens we can see already, the accretion disk of far away black holes. Out there somewhere is more strange stuff. This could help us find more stuff to find.
http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951
"Dark-matter filaments, such as the one bridging the
galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223, are predicted
to contain more than half of all matter in the Universe."
Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich
The presence of dark matter is usually inferred by the way its strong gravity bends light travelling from distant galaxies that lie behind it distorting their apparent shapes as seen by telescopes on Earth. But it is difficult to observe this 'gravitational lensing' by dark matter in filaments because they contain relatively little mass.
Dietrich and his colleagues got around this problem by studying a particularly massive filament, 18 megaparsecs long, that bridges the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. Luckily, this dark bridge is oriented so that most of its mass lies along the line of sight to Earth, enhancing the lensing effect, explains Dietrich. The team examined the distortion of more than 40,000 background galaxies, and calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 10[SUP]13[/SUP] and 9.8 × 10[SUP]13[/SUP] times the mass of the Sun. Their results are reported in Nature today[SUP]1[/SUP].
Dark Matter, recently an observation of funny rotation in galaxy formations and now perhaps directly observed through our old friend the Space Warp. Gravity Lens.
Now, this idea is not in the article, but it occurs to me the problem with using gravity lens to see stuff is, the big mass in the middle. What if the big mass in the middle was invisible? With visible mass accumulated, lens we can see already, the accretion disk of far away black holes. Out there somewhere is more strange stuff. This could help us find more stuff to find.
http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951
"Dark-matter filaments, such as the one bridging the
galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223, are predicted
to contain more than half of all matter in the Universe."
Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich
The presence of dark matter is usually inferred by the way its strong gravity bends light travelling from distant galaxies that lie behind it distorting their apparent shapes as seen by telescopes on Earth. But it is difficult to observe this 'gravitational lensing' by dark matter in filaments because they contain relatively little mass.
Dietrich and his colleagues got around this problem by studying a particularly massive filament, 18 megaparsecs long, that bridges the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. Luckily, this dark bridge is oriented so that most of its mass lies along the line of sight to Earth, enhancing the lensing effect, explains Dietrich. The team examined the distortion of more than 40,000 background galaxies, and calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 10[SUP]13[/SUP] and 9.8 × 10[SUP]13[/SUP] times the mass of the Sun. Their results are reported in Nature today[SUP]1[/SUP].