The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope has turned up something truly weird (possible subscription wall):
Astronomers have spotted a huge cloud of fiery gas speeding through a distant cluster of galaxies. They say it is the biggest object of its kind ever seen.
The gas ball contains more matter than a 1,000 billion Suns, and is plunging through the Abell 3266 cluster of galaxies at about 750 kilometres per second. The fireball is about 3 million light years across, roughly 5 billion times the diameter of the Solar System, and reaches temperatures of tens of millions of degrees.
As unimaginably humongous balls of flaming gas go, this one’s a peripatetic:
The giant gas ball is mostly made from hydrogen, but contains much larger amounts of heavier elements than the surrounding cluster, suggesting that it is a stranger to the area.
If you think that nobody has a clue how this thing works, look for the tells:
Why, then, does the superheated fireball not fly apart? According to Mark Henriksen, also a member of the research team at UMBC, the answer is dark matter.
Dark matter is thought to make up more than 80% of the Universe’s mass. Being dark, it is invisible and has never been identified: but astronomers believe that its gravitational pull helps to explain why all sorts of large-scale structures, from individual galaxies to superclusters that contain thousands of the things, don’t fly apart.
Better-informed readers will surely prove me wrong, but it seems that “dark matter” is the astronomer’s all-purpose jackalope, their version of Reagan’s magic asterisks. Somebody might explain some day how the heck this thing works, but for now we just plug in ‘dark matter’ and hope that this friendly media person asks about something else.
Oh yeah, because I’m a dork I immediately thought of this:
Read more about the discovery from people who write for a living: 1, 2, 3 , 4.
Steve
Maybe it’s INTELLIGENT dark matter.
ppGaz
At long last, we’ve found the Weapons of Mass Destruction!
More good news for Bush!
Ked
Yes, Dark Matter seems to be the only explanation to deal with some systems that rotate so fast that they should fly apart, unless there is a huge amount of mass holding the whole thing together. There were alternative explanations, such as errors in Newtonian laws, but they have been ruled out with new data.
Now for what this dark matter is, this is pretty much a mistery. Some think it is just matter that we do not directly see (planets, asteroids, black holes), others think it is something that interacts very lightly with matter (for instance neutrinos). Lots of theories but nothing yet and many laboratories are working on that subject, to find out what dark matter is. And if it represents 70% to 80% of the total mass of the universe, then there must be an awful lot right there in your living room.
For the specialist spotting errors, sorry, i am just an amateur.
Blue Neponset
Maybe it is a weapon?
Anyone read Judas Unchained?
Ancient Purple
Hail, Hail
Fire and Snow
For the Angel
We will go.
Far away
Far to see
Friendly Angel
Come to me.
Melvin Belli will save us!
Richard 23
Wow, the last time I saw Matt Decker (William Windom) (from The Doomsday Machine episode of Star Trek) was on the remake of Miracle on 34th Street. What was this post about again? Dark what does it Matter? Oh yeah, Darkman was cool too!
tBone
Great, great book, at least if you’re a sci-fi dweeb like me. Probably my favorite SF series of the last 15 years or so. All of Hamilton’s stuff is pretty good, with the exception of “Misspent Youth.”
As for dark matter, it is, of course, just more lefty science propaganda like global warming and evolution. The gravitational effects astronomers have observed are much more likely to be the result of a universe-wide mesh of invisible angel hair pasta excreted by the FSM.
DJAnyReason
1) Dark Matter
2) ???
3) Profit!
srv
Oh, Tim, you’re back.
Wondering if you’re going to write about this:
Is your chemistry set registered?
h/t reddit
Keith
if you wanna talk about nebulous BS theories, try dark energy. At least with dark matter, there’s some possibilities as to what it is (WIMPS, for example), but dark matter is supposedly some extremely huge amount (3x the amount of dark matter) of energy that we can’t find.
Buck
Kirk: Am I correct in assuming that a fusion explosion of 97 megatons will result if a starship impulse engine is overloaded?
Spock: No, sir. It is 97.835 megatons.
Krista
That’s one thing that’s always sort of amused me about Star Trek. They always wind up facing this problem that they’ve NEVER encountered before, and that nobody could have foreseen, but within about 10 seconds, one of them says, “Well, we could X with the Y, which should result in Z.” And lo and behold, it works. I guess I’m more of a Galactica fan for the very reason that there aren’t quick and easy answers to their problems.
Zifnab
It’s not exactly a conspiracy theory.
Dark Matter is just “Matter We Can’t See”. Gravity is the most significant acting force on large bodies. Where as, at the atomic and sub-atomic levels, magnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces keep particles together, at the galactic and intergalactic size catagories these forces mean almost nothing. Often times intersteller bodies will act strangely, with planets rotating around fixed points that appear empty and high energy bodies – like ‘hell’ – remaining together when they should apparently explode apart. Gravity is the only force strong enough to hold the system together, but often the matter we see is not sufficent for physics to explain why the system does not fall apart. Since there’s not enough matter that we can see, Physicists make the assumption there must be some degree of matter that we can’t see.
This ‘dark matter’ is much like a glass table holding up a plate. You can’t see the table, because light passes right through it, but you know that the plate would fall if there was nothing holding it up. Seeing the plate, we are left to assume A) this plate just doesn’t obey gravity for some reason or B) the plate has a table under it we can’t see. Physicists like to default to explaination B because it doesn’t make their heads explode.
r4d20
The best analogy is probably “the Aether”. At the time light was thought to be a wave, but a wave has to move through something – water, air, etc. So “the Aether” was the postulated medium through which light moved, and it was accepted as “fact” until the Michelson-Morely experiments proved that the speed of light was constant in all directions and the only possible conclusion was that the whole concept of an all-pervading aether was wrong from the start. Dark Matter is the same kind of gap-filler theory.
Frankly, I think Dark Matter is going to go the same way as the Aether too. Gravity is the only one of the four fundamental forces that cannot be described in a “unified” theory along with the other 3. The reason is that its effects only become really strong, compared with the other forces, on a scale that is HUGE compared to people – incredible masses and huge distances. On the other hand, the other forces can be made much stronger in a much more comfined environment and therefore are more ameniable to lab experiments.
Just like we discovered that the world on the scale of the nuclei behaved fundamentally different from the world on our scale, I think we will find that there are still-unknown effects and behaviors that only become observable on the incredibly huge scale of galaxies.
Joey
Since tbone encouraged me to fly my nerd flag….
I like both a lot (though Star Wars is my first love when it comes to sci-fi), though I agree with you to a certain extent. That’s why I liked DS9 so much. It always seemed far more realistic. Not everything was perfect. In fact, a lot of stuff was messed up, and there was almost never an easy answer, at least not for the major events, like the Bajoran government situation or the war with the Dominion. I missed the second season of BSG as my college dorm didn’t have Sci-Fi, but I plan on picking it up on DVD as soon as the whole season is released. If it’s as good as the first season, it’s the best show on tv.
r4d20
Just to clarify – of course there is unobservable (to us) matter in the universe. In that sense “Dark Matter” definitely exists. The question is if this Dark Matter is actually the sole cause of the behaviors attributed to it – is it true that this dark matter makes up 80% of the galaxy or could there be other effects also at work.
r4d20
Nothing beats G.I. Joe. No matter what raygun you got shot with, the answer was always the same – “Reverse the Polarity” and shoot you again.
Tim F.
Didn’t the Ghostbusters do that? I tried it once with a transfer tank where I was moving proteins from a gel onto a nitrocellulose membrane, but instead of getting world-shaking results (Nature paper! International accolades!), the proteins just ran backwards into the buffer and I had to start over. Kind of anticlimactic if you grew up on those TV shows.
r4d20
Ked,
Wow. I just did some work and I found that, apparently, I beleive in the MOND theory which you just said was discredited. Could you post a link so I could take a look.
r4d20
I remember them Reversing Polarity in the original GI Joe miniseries. Cobra had a big raygun with a crystal in it (of course) and it changed people somehow, but Joe fixed everyone by reversing the polarity and shooting them again.
Ancient Purple
I would just like to remind everyone that everything said here so far is sheer folly.
The universe is only about 6,001 years old with Earth being pretty much the focal point.
Oh, and the Flintstones is actually more like a documentary on how it really was when man lived with dinosaurs.
Oh, and the whole speed of light thing was either 1) already set in motion or 2) is a test of faith to see if you are going to believe science or God.
Remember:
Intelligent Design = goodness, love, Heaven
Science and Evolution = burn in hell you puking, maggot-infested Satan worshiper.
Of course, I only say that last part out of Christian love.
Joey
“Reverse the polarity”, “remodulate the shields/phasers”, I think everything with even a hint of sci-fi has something along those lines. Gotta have something to keep the Borg/ghosts/Cobras/Decepticons/Cylons at bay. A near unstoppable enemy is frightening and entertaining. A completely unstoppable enemy makes for a rather dull show.
Andrew
I’m voting Saget/Flaming Galactic Hell Ball in ’08.
Mr Furious
I didn’t think of that immediately, Tim, but the dork in me is glad you did. Love that episode…
Bruce Moomaw
We mustn’t forget the still more mysterious “dark energy” — discovered only in the late 1990s — which makes up fully 70% of the total mass/energy of the Universe (dark matter makes up only about 25%, and regular matter/energy only about 5%), and which is causing the Universe to actually expand faster and faster with time. Scientists have been going nuts trying to come up with an explanation for this stuff, and have come up with such baroque concepts as “quintessence”. My own feeling is that it can be far more easily explained by the simple theory that the rest of the Universe is sensibly trying to get away from the human race as fast as possible.
chopper
well, dark matter/dark energy don’t make too much sense when you look at them through the lens of traditional physics, i.e. there’s something ‘there.’ it sounds goofy that way.
there’s some really cool thinking in M-theory that explains the presence of dark matter. the idea is, our universe is contained within a ‘brane’ and is interacting with another brane. three of our traditional forces, strong/weak nuclear and EM, are closed, that is the strings that ferry the forces are tied at both ends to our brane. so those three forces don’t interact at all with the other brane.
however, gravity is open-ended, and thus our brane interacts with the other. over long distances, the force of gravity gets stretched out and weakened (in general, the strength of a particular force correlates inversely to the relative size of the associated curled-up dimension. that’s why newer particle accelerators are exciting news to researchers in supergravity and string-based gravity theories since the extra gravitational dimension believed to be curled up may have a large enough diameter that with sufficient experimentation we can actually see the effects).
anyhoo, every coupla years some dude comes out with a brilliant, if generic theory explaining the way forces work in a cool, comprehensive way. wheeler/feynman absorber theory (and chu’s further take off onnit) was a really cool way of explaining particle interactions using both ends of maxwell’s equations and invoking a rad ‘quantum handshake’.
new ideas coming out of string theory re: dark matter are pretty cool too, like our observable universe is an N-dimensional surface of an expanding N+1-dimensional ‘volume’, similar to the surface of a balloon being inflated. the two branes interact via gravity as explained above, explaining why dark matter makes up so much of that which gravitationally interacts (the volume is bigger than the thin surface), and it also helps explain not only the expansion of the universe, it does so by sticking to the traditional framework of the expansion of space, not matter, and also avoids the universe as we know it having a center (the big bang is posited to have happened everywhere, and the universe has no definite center where it occured any more than the surface of a balloon has a ‘center’).
i am so not a physics guy anymore, so half of the above is probably wrong or a misinterpretation. back when i studied modern physics dark matter was still pretty new. this junk gets complicated.
Bruce Moomaw
I tell you, I’m a moderately competent aerospace writer — and I have NEVER been able to figure what the hell the cosmologists are talking about when they insist that the structure of 3-D space in the Universe can expand without having some higher-dimensional continuum for it to expand THROUGH, like the surface of an expanding balloon.
The recent advent of brane theory is therefore something of a relief for me on this subject — along with providing a convincing possible explanation for the Big Bang within a greater continuum. (As I understand it, brane theory calls for the Universe to have been created when our brane and another collided with each other within that higher-dimensional continuum and then bounced apart again, with the energy of the collision being partially converted into matter within both branes. If so, the Big Bang may be about to be replaced with the Cosmic Fender-Bender.)
VAMark
Let us know where to order the bumper stickers.
Tulkinghorn
You could call it the ‘Misanthropic Principle.”
Ben
All I really know is that we’re basically still just a bunch of monkeys scratching about in the dirt when it comes to really understanding what the f–k is going on… One need only look at our current leadership…. I find it really interesting that most of the time it’s those people most vehemently apposed to the theory of evolution that prove to me that we definately are evolved from a bunch of poo flinging lemurs.
yet another jeff
Oh come on…it’s obvious that this speedball o’ flame is God.
Nikki
All I know is we’re all gonna DIE!!!!!!
Pb
Seems to me that this giant gas ball thing *is* dark matter–or rather it *was*. That is to say, it’s a huge amount of matter that was previously unaccounted for. What if there are more of these things? Anyhow, it sounds like a galaxy-sized star or something.
canuckistani
I wouldn’t call dark energy a theory yet. I’d keep it on the hypothesis shelf, since we really have no idea what is causing the accellerated expansion of the universe. But that’s what real science is all about. You keep running into freaky-ass shit, and you don’t know what’s going on until the research and the theorizing have been done.
The alternative is to say “We don’t understand it; It must be the handiwork of Zeus”. But that isn’t science.
Punchy
Is it just me, or does that picture look disturbingly like the Enterprise is about to enter some Intergallatic Vagina at warp speed?
Punchy
Tim;
If allowed, may I ask your science background? You seem scientifically adept, reasoned, and knowledgeable in myriad of topics. Impressive to say the least. TIA.
Krista
The real question is: what in the hell is a guy like you doing in a place like this? ;)
r4d20
Attributing everyting to Zeus would be stupid – everyone knows he’s mainly responsible for thunder and lightning.
yet another jeff
I remember a pre-Pantera band in small town Texas that had a song called “The Whole World’s a Cuckold When Zeus Takes Human Form”…. Point being that there are a few other areas of expertise in Zeus’s repertoire.
But ginormous fireballs? I’d attribute that to Apollo.
Or maybe it’s heading for planets that allow abortion and gay marraige….
Buck
Dark Matter = Matter We Can’t See
Faith = the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen
So is faith dark matter or is dark matter faith?
And Punchy, I do believe I see the uterus.
yet another jeff
Dark Matter is either faith or God…
No difference in the order, Buck. Your question is like asking if that’s peanut butter in your chocolate, or chocolate covering your peanut butter. Either way, it’s delicious.
Ryan S.
Not entirely true, you can see the effects of dark matter. In the rotational velocity of galaxies, universal expansion, and now this ‘fireball’.
Unlikely because most of the universe would have to be made up of these things.
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. This thing is 3,000,000 light years across. Or galaxy is a rather large one so its more like 30-40 galaxies in size.
Ryan S.
OUR(is what it should say) galaxy is a rather large one so its more like 30-40 galaxies in size.
yet another jeff
Surely I’m not the first to wonder if it’s headed for us…
Ryan S.
This article clears this up better.
And its probably so far away thats its prolly already gone, remember the further away you look the farther in time your seeing.
Pb
Ryan S.,
Indeed, so what would you suggest for a size comparison. Also, this thing will probably travel 250,000 light years or so before it’s done–of course, that’ll take millions of years, but hey… :)
Ryan S.
Well, the ‘fireball’ is thirty milky ways put end to end wide
or about 3 1/2 times the distance to the andromeda galaxy our nearest galactic neighbor.
Ryan S.
Whoops that is SO wrong it IS about as wide as the distance to the Andromeda galaxy.
Ryan S.
Math Joke
But I was only off by a multiplicitive constant.
Pb
Now *that’s* impressive!
Punchy
Ah…the Membrane-Gel Stack Reversal, causing one to transfer all proteins first into the sponges and then into transfer buffer oblivion. That’s when you just pretend that your gel sucked anyways and the antibodies had no chance irregardless….
Ryan S.
Hmm… sounds like you need to adjust your electrophoresis voltage.
Buck
No matter how big it is it still just represents a single spark from the big bang.
Ryan S.
Hey, srv. Have you seen this wired article. I know I’ve been linking this alot.
Tim F.
Nothing wrong with the question, although it will be tricky to answer and keep up my half-assed effort at anonymity. I started out with a bachelor’s in ecology/ev bio that produced a small paper in the obscurest, lowest-impact-factor ecology journal that you’ve never heard of. I did some summer work as a TEM tech and later as a tech in a neuro/mol bio lab where I mostly focused on PCR assays. Later I did MS work in biological oceanography because I always wanted to study sharks, and algae are like sharks in that they live in the sea but unlike sharks in that you can get funding and publish in interesting journals. Now I’m pursuing a PhD in cell biology. It’s been a long, strange trip.
Yeah, I saw the Wired article and I kept thinking about blogging it but somehow that never happened. It seems like a sad story when people build protective bubbles around their kids, but then with the internetrons these days any 11-year-old is a few clicks away from some seriously dangerous experimentation. On balance I think there should be far more popular science guilds out there along the lines of rocketry clubs and ham radio groups offering kids a somewhat-supervised introduction into the fine and destructive arts of science.
Either that or we need more disposable backyard sheds and surplus reproduction.
Larry Weintraub
As an Astrophysicist who reads this blog I must respond. Dark Matter has more to it than just explaining spinning galaxies not flying apart. It also explains early universe physics leading up to the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the evolution of structure (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the filamental structures that make up the universe.) Also, the composition of elements in primordial gas tells us how much baryonic matter (stuff on the Periodic Table) there is, and there’s clearly a lot more matter than there are protons, electrons and Periodic Table stuff. So, Dark Matter’s on very solid ground, and I wouldn’t put it in the same sentance as Ronald Reagan’s magic asterisks.
As for how much is in your living room – Dark Matter clusters at the center of structures, and is less dense in the Solar neighborhood, 30,000 lt yrs from the center of the Milky Way. My back of the envelope calculation is your living room should have about 10^-12 grams of dark matter in it. Which is not much. And much of the dark matter in the Milky Way disk is probably cool stellar remnants, which are not in your living room, and thus the real number is surely smaller than the number above.
So, Tim, if you could keep the snark about Dark Matter to a minimum, it would make me much happier.
Do not construe my neglect of Dark Energy to imply that I’m ok with that snark either, though we certainly know less about it than Dark Matter.
Ryan S.
I’m SO there. More explosions! More women!
Perry Como
There was plenty of danger pre-internets (or at least pre-widespread-internets). Most of the stuff I did as a kid would get someone locked up as a Colombine type these days (calcium carbide rules).
Punchy
Thanks! I too am ~a year~ away from the magical PhD, albeit in pharmaceutical chemistry. Wow, with all that diverse knowledge, you picked cell bio? I’m not snarking your choice, only that you and approx 1,397,450 other cell bio Fuds will be hunting down that post-doc position. tough competition.
As for this…
…had me spit Coke onto my keyboard. I smell a winner for the Most Obvious Thus Unintentionally Funniest Comment of the week.
BIRDZILLA
Its the DOOMSDAY MACHINE and it eats planets its dangerous how do we deactivate it? JUST DENONATE A STAR SHIP with in it like the USS CONSTILATION NCC 1017 and you can also cuase some monor damage by taking a shuttle craft into it