Hubble found dark matter?
 

An international team of astronomers has mapped what appears to be a ring of dark matter around a massive galaxy cluster located some five billion light-years from Earth.

"We believe that this is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter," James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said today in a telephone briefing with reporters.

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up most of the matter in the universe. But because it neither emits nor reflects light, its existence is inferred through indirect means. (See a computer-simulated picture of dark matter.)

The new finding adds to a growing body of evidence that dark matter exists.

Last August another team of scientists said that they detected dark matter in a galaxy cluster called the bullet cluster.

The new evidence comes from a galaxy cluster called ZwC10024+1652. The Hubble Space Telescope took an image of the cluster in 2004.

Astronomers mapped the distribution of dark matter through observations of how gravity bends the light of more distant background galaxies in the image. This technique is called gravitational lensing.

Jee explained that while the dark matter itself is invisible, it distorts the light coming from the background galaxies somewhat, like a ripple of water passing over pebbles at the bottom of a pond.

As the astronomers made the map, they noticed the dark matter formed a ghostly ring around the galaxy cluster. The ring measures 2.6 million light-years across.

The map also shows that dark matter is distributed within the cluster.
Richard White, a team member from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, explained at the briefing that the technique allows scientists to determine the distribution of all the matter in the galaxy cluster.

"We can have great confidence that that ring is there and that it really is quite a different distribution than the rest of the matter of the cluster," he said.


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Holy shit!

I read about this! First visual evidence opf massive amount sof "dark matter"!
I cannot wait until they figure out whatthis stuff is! It makes up about 90% of the universe!!!!!

dark matter is a myth started by frazzled mathematicians who can't find formulae to compute cross-dimensional graviton leakage!

fight the power!

Oops, I spilled graviton down my shirt?

no worries, it will come out in the wash.

singularities, on the other hand, are much harder to scrub off..

Interesting! I'm really interested in the universe and things out there these days.

Interesting read. Thanks.
I like your avatar floatingslowly. Maximilian rules!

If we can prove that the multiverse theory is correct then that would account for the "dark matter" as the gravitosns would permeate all the branes and not just our local universe's one. weird shit.
If not, then dark matter is some form of matter, some form of elementary particle, that we just have NO clue about. I wonder what it is?

Insane shit!

Well there goes my theory.

"So, we think we found something out there. You can't see it. You can't feel it. But if you look real hard, those galaxies will distort a little. We think that is dark matter..."

exactly!


PUSHING BACK THE GRAVITONS:

and here i was thinking that dark matter was the shit of nibbler

first I was like "ho shit, The Pirates of Dark Water is real?" and then I was disappointed

"A pound of which weighs up to one thousand pounds!"

(or something like that...)

best thread on this board.