Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe
An engineering undergraduate in Australia has made a major step forward in solving one of the greatest riddles of the universe: that is, where most of it is. Boffins know from observing the universe that it must have a certain amount of mass, otherwise it would have failed to hold itself together as well as it has. Argument …
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Can we finally close the book on this one, please?
We've got a Rapture to be getting on with, and we've already had to postpone it twice while they sorted this missing mass out...
No
Just no:
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/72/images/darkMatterPie-590.jpg
1 down...
So just the whole higgs boson thing to sort out and we can all rupture away to our hearts content!
What's wrong with
Turtles all the way down(*)?
(*) not forgetting the four elephants standing on the topmost one.
The 'Big Bang' is a fallacy
The 'Big Suck' is the proper 'theory'.
EOM
perhaps they can turn their attention to...
What would happen if you tied jam on toast jam side up on the back of a cat and dropped the cat onto the floor
re: and dropped the cat onto the floor
I would guess - one very peeved moggie
free electricity
Well, it wouldn't reach the floor but the resulting revolving cat could be mounted to a generator.
Who said there wasn't a perpetual motion machine?
The cat and jam toast cancel eachother out..
This is known as Jammy Dodger theory.
it works
just as well with butter, but we have yet to develop a full understanding of toast with boat and a burmese as opposed to a moggy response
actually
it is not perpetual motion - energy gets lost from the system in a high pitched wail and you have to refuel the cat every 2 hours
Re: actually
Hmm, we appear to be getting into Buttered Cat Array theory here.
Also hmm. It would seem that search engine results for such are no longer returning the original from the usenet oracle, but someone's later recycling of the concept as a competition entry to Omni magazine.
Precis (all AFAIR): The toast is immaterial to the effect. The staining properties of the "butter" are important, as are the properties of the surface over which the cat is dropped. Optimum results are achieved by buttering cats directly with Tikka Masala sauce and releasing them over white Axminster shagpile carpet, as this combination causes the cat to remain suspended and rotating in mid-air even while carrying a significant additional load.
Large Buttered Cat Arrays are used by aliens to provide anti-gravity effect for their flying saucers. Alien spacecraft are often reported as generating a humming noise, which is actually the sound of many thousands of moggies purring in unison.
There's also the issue of...
... emissions. Imagine catturds at 500rpm.
Addition of the quantum of jam on toast ...
... has been discussed by Mr Schrödinger in some detail. The process is known as quantum superposition.
Bless Her
... for finding that. We knew it was around somewhere.
where did you last see it?
it is a uniquely female skill.
Mine's the one with a Higgs somewhere in one of the pockets
On the other hand...
It's a unique female skill to lose something in the first place (keys, brush, phone, dark matter etc), before blaming you for losing it, then taking all the credit for finding it after 'you' lost it, then constantly reminding you of that 'fact' for the next 20 years.
90% Of My Phone...
*
...calls to SO begin with "where is."
*The other ten percent are beer related.
Credit the junior as lead
If you think the research is very dubious?
The correct title would be
"undergrad misses half the universe" if you read the article, supervisor pointed out the stuff.
"Whatever the missing mass of the universe is, I hope it's not cockroaches!" - mom
"extending from galaxies"
The universe's equivalent of "down the back of the couch"
She is really...
in trouble if her partner is looking for his/her keys and she says she doesn't know!
Congrats to her though. :-)
Heh
Just goes to show you can't rely on men finding anything that's been misplaced.
H2G2
If you read this in the right way it gets remarkably close to the discovery of the infinity improbability drive.
Scientists had made theories about the universe mut however much they tried to add up the mass of all the stars and galaxies it never added up to a big enough number, so they sighed and decided that the rest was made up of "missing mass". Then one day a Phd student reasoned that if this mass was "missing" then it must be possible to find it so she got the biggest telescope she could find and point out where this mass was ....
But....
...now that the theory has been demonstrated the missing mass will immediately disappear and be replaced with something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
And the funny thing is, it's already happened....no, wait!
Like this penguin's fat belly, cropped but nearby
If that mass is extragalactic, then it can't contribute much to keeping the galactic rotation curves flat. The mass must be nearby here, in the galactic disk.
I know nothing..nothiiiing
Actually no, if the mass was inside the the currect accepted edges of the galaxy the galaxy would rotate faster, for the edges of the galaxy to rotate at the current speed the mass needs to be outside, slowing the rotation, so that what we think is the edge of the galaxy isn't actually the edge, just the visible edge. Much like a wet cat, it would appear to rotate slower when its wet, but fluffed out you can see the rotation is correct acording to the actual edge of the cat, the fur on the periphery of a fluffed cat would move faster that that of a wet cat, but in actual fact its all the same.
Err
are you assuming that galaxies are solid discs? Care to take a look out of the window and see if you can see that massive sheet of metal tying us to the centre of the galaxy? I think I misplaced it.
The galaxies are rotating far too fast for the matter we can see to hold them in. Modelling both the central bulge and then the disc with Newtonian gravity we can draw up how we expect the speed of stars at different radii from the centre to look. The graph peaks at about the edge of the central bulge and then decays away. Don't like it? Go and pick a fight with Newton (and, indeed, reality; like it or not, this is how physics appears to work, unless you're silly enough to look at galaxy rotation curves.)
Then we go and look, and we don't see it at all and instead see the stars rotating at a *constant* speed. This can be explained by hypothesising an extra clump of matter in a spherical "halo", centred on the bulge but extending out much further.
Hence, to make the galaxies spin faster the missing matter has to be inside.
However this is all beside the point because if you even read Lewis' (somewhat ill-informed) article you'll see the words "electron density" coming up very clearly there. If you then go and read the article you'll probably be left, like me, wondering a bit what they're even talking about, but the net result is that they've found an electron density in filaments.
Not dark matter. Electrons. We've got a very good idea of how much normal matter there should be in the universe (about 5%, and that number's actually robust even if you disagree with applying the big bang model in the recent universe), and how much dark matter, which is about 25%. So far as I can tell, the issue is/was that we can't look around and count up enough normal matter to make 5%. NOT that this is dark matter because it isn't.
"Good news everyone ..."
@Err
"Not dark matter. Electrons."
That's because everyone knows that dark matter is Nibbler-poop shaped like D12s.
Mine's the one with the Planet Express logo on the back
Colin
@But...
And shortly afterwards, said extremely smug person got lynched by a bunch of Scientists, or at least that is how _that_ story ended.
Close
Dark matter is indeed Nibbler-poop, and is so heavy that one pound of it weighs 10,000 pounds.
The D12 shaped object is the anti-backwards crystal.
mines the one with the shiny metal ass.
To HELL with "Rapture", there's more to enjoy unfolding the universe
It's eye-watering, heart-warming stuff like this that makes me hope like hell that there is no "rapture" for at least 6 million years. Rapture should be a day of reckoning on the individual basis, not planetary or universal scale.
re: and dropped the cat on the floor
Everyone knows the answer to this paradox; the toast falls off the cat and lands jam side down. The cat lands feet up, flees the scene, and won't come near you for days.
If you want a problem solved...
...find an engineer! :)
Seriously though, quite the achievement and pleasing to see that credit was given where due.
pics are out there
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/show/monash-student-finds-universes-missing-mass?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=newsfeed
/coat
mine's the one with the camera in the pocket.
A very dark matter indeed...
Breaking: Finance undergraduate in Australia discovers £4.4B hole in EU science budget, £500M hole in UK budget. Where did it all go?
What does this mean for CERN?
Does this mean the hunt for the Higgs Boson is never going to find it?
Can we rename the filaments to be the Higgs Boson filaments?
Nah and nah
This has nothing to do with the Higg's boson and everything to do with calculating the electron density in some filamentary structures. Lewis conflated that (to some degree) with the dark matter problem, but it's actually separate. We know how much "baryonic matter" (and yes, electrons are for some reason called baryons in cosmology, same as anything heavier than helium is called "metal" in astronomy in general) there should be. That's a number distinct from the amount of dark matter there should be. But there didn't even seem to be enough baryonic matter to make it up. This study seems to have found a bunch of it.
At least, that's what I took from it. But I'm not really all that clear what they were looking for or how, so I might be a bit wrong. Or even very wrong.
Hopefully a better fit
I've never liked "Dark Matter is the Answer" as a solution to the problem. It's too much like magic.
I always though that too.
"There is no God. The Universe is 3/4 made up of stuff that we're pretty sure is there- it's all here in these books- but you can't see it and aren't aware of feeling it's presence. Now THAT is Science!" never quite sat right with me.
Sorted. Next problem!
female undergraduate makes great discovery
but is she a babe?
She has a FB page
quick google image search finds a facebook page - based on that I'd say yes. Plus she has a somewhat good choice in beverages.
And this, of course
is why female engineers are rare as hen's teeth and about as dangerous as WWII-vintage UXO to approach when found.
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