Hubble snaps dark matter warping spacetime The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a 19-hour snapshot of galaxies whose images have been warped by the presence of the baffling interstellar substance known as "dark matter", residing in an intervening galactic cluster. The image, released Thursday, shows the cluster – known prosaically as MACS J1206.2-0847, or simply MACS …
> in the current US political climate, its multi-billion-dollar price tag makes it a prime target...
Sod that!
I hear Eric "Fast And Furious" Holder is currently busy stoking the propaganda machine for action against Iran with bad plot devices. Just in time to divert the restless people at home. Don't tell me there isn't space for a few more "billions and billions" (excuses to Carl Sagan) in the Fed's RDBMS.
Paper money dark matter - nobody sees it, but everyone feels its beguiling pull. And suddenly it's too late.
In string theory, gravity is not confined to a single universe but is allowed to range through the 'bulk' between universes. The past and the future are special cases of multiple universes, and there is a range of universes encompassing every possibility that has come out of quantum results in the past. As time goes on, you would expect the gravitational effect of 'dark matter' (gravity from other universes) to increase as the number of resulting universes increases. This should be falsifiable.
@Chris Miller
The statement was not that it made up 90% of the universe, but 90% of the matter in the universe. That statement is correct.
The total universe, or rather the energy in the universe is made up to ~ 75% of dark energy. That leaves ~25% for matter. Out of those ~25%, ~23% are dark matter. This means that ~92% of all matter dark matter. Exactly what was said in the article.
If you want to speak of the total mass/energy of the universe, normal matter makes up slightly less than 5%. If you want to exclude dark energy, then dark matter is about 5/6 of the universe. So in either case, the article is incorrect, and I stand by my comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
It's just a pity that an image wasn't produced that actually identified some of the "47 multiple images of 12 newly identified distant galaxies". I can see objects that appear to be the same, but I'm no expert and one galaxy can look pretty much the same as another.
A few helpful annotations would have made this picture even more awesome.
Professor Bruce Draine, at Princeton, pointed out some while ago that as well as lensing by distant galaxies a similar process could occur with relatively nearby gas clouds.
ftp://ftp.astro.princeton.edu/draine/papers/pdf/ApJL_509_L41.pdf
It would be interesting to know how many examples of lensing have been examined using spectroscopy to check for the absorption lines that would signify gas cloud rather than galactic.lensing.
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