Cosmic mystery solved? Possible Dark Matter signal spotted

[Hawaiian Punch]

Oddly enough a yahoo commenter summed up my thoughts perfectly

"How is this useful?" is always going to be a short-sighted question. Lore suggests that back in 1850 when Michael Faraday invented what's essentially an electric dynamo, England's minister of finance asked him how such a discovery/invention could have any practical usage and Faraday responded something like "I'm sure you'll figure out a way to tax it." Of course, harnessing electricity has completely changed humanity's destiny.

Why study dark matter? The answer right now is that we don't really know why, but when/if we figure it out, there's a good chance that it will drastically change how we understand and interact with the Universe."

http://news.yahoo.com/cosmic-mystery-solved-possible-dark-matter-signal-spotted-124020784.html

Cosmic Mystery Solved? Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted
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 corresponds to no known particle or atom and thus may have been produced by dark matter, researchers said. [Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe]

"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," 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.

Dark matter is so named because it neither absorbs nor emits light and therefore cannot be directly observed. But astronomers know dark matter exists because it interacts gravitationally with the "normal" matter we can see and touch.

And there is apparently a lot of dark matter out there: Observations of star motion and galaxy dynamics suggest that about 80 percent of all matter in the universe is "dark," exerting a gravitational force but not interacting with light.

Researchers have proposed a number of different exotic particles as the constituents of dark matter, including weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axions and sterile neutrinos, hypothetical cousins of "ordinary" neutrinos (confirmed particles that resemble electrons but lack an electrical charge).

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.

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.

"Confirmation of this discovery may lead to construction of new telescopes specially designed for studying the signals from dark matter particles," Boyarsky said. "We will know where to look in order to trace dark structures in space and will be able to reconstruct how the universe has formed."

 

[tmonster]

could be or it could be something completely different than what we know we don't know about dark matter
either way, super exciting if consistently reproducible and as pervasive as the expected presence of dark matter

 

[OH SOHH TRILL]

might be a reaper

 

[ORDER_66]

might be a reaper

I dont think...earth is ready for them problems lets not think about that.

 

[Propaganda]

could be or it could be something completely different than what we know we don't know about dark matter
either way, super exciting if consistently reproducible and as pervasive as the expected presence of dark matter

well if it lines up with their predictions it sounds like they're on the right path (considering how abstract "dark matter" is). so whatever you want to call it, yeah if they can further verify this...this will be a pretty big deal.

 

[CouldntBeMeTho]

possibly detecting it, is faaaaar from calling it a solved mystery. interesting tho

 

[Brown_Pride]

So i know we can't see dark matter but this article said something i didn't know before

"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,"

My previous understanding was that dark matter was sorta like a dark spot in the sky that we knew housed "something" because we could see the gravitation effects, but that we couldn't see because it emitted no light...

Instead it's like we see an object, calculate an expected gravity but when we measure it there is more gravity? Isn't it possible things are just more dense than we expect?

Also, do we see evidence of dark matter in our own solar system?

 

[Captain]

Dark matter is everywhere because it is nothing. We will find out soon through these new measuring devices "nothing" is actually something. This "no thing" is what holds the entire university together & gives action to everything; consciousnesses.