Photo: NASA from the Hubble Space Telescope
This is kind of fun, Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter. Ghostly ring! dark matter!!! Spooky!!
Astronomers have discovered an enormous, ghostly ring of dark matter 5 billion light-years away--the most blatant evidence to date for the existence of a mysterious substance hidden throughout the universe.I joke, but this is actually serious stuff in the astrophysical world, and a pretty important discovery.
Dark matter makes up a vast majority of gravity-exerting mass in the universe, while only about 10 percent is matter we can see and touch. If dark matter didn't exist, scientists say, galaxies like the Milky Way would have already flown apart from a severe lack of gravitational "glue."
The picture is cool as well.
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4 comments:
very cool
Beautiful pic, even tho I don't understand how the ring can be identified as dark matter from a zillion light years away.
Beautiful, nevertheless.
Its my understanding that the dark matter distribution is inferred from observing gravity induced distortions in the images of background galaxies. The astronomers calculate what kind of dark matter distribution would be needed to cause the distortions in the shapes of the galaxies they see. This is the best evidence of the existance of dark matter so far.
Backyard Astronomer
Kittens and bees and physics, o my!
I leave physics to my betters - but the photo is wonderful, and what about all those galaxies! There must be scores of them countable even in that small low-res jpg!
Li'l Innocent
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