Dark Matter revealed...

It cannot be seen, but its gravitational effects can be detected based on how light from sources behind the dark matter is changed. Supposedly the stuff makes up the majority of the universe with other matter only comprising maybe a few percent of the total.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a ring of it very, very far away:
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=5535

hmmm yeh saw an article on this a few weeks ago in a New Scientist magazine. its pretty cool in a way.

That stuff always makes me go dizzy.It blows me away how big and surprising the universe is.Interesting stuff.Oh,and for the picture,needs more colour and the render should be more visible loll.{ doesn't the real thing look dull compared to what great artists can make?}

yeh it looks really dull lol. but hey isnt that half the point of art?

I remember last year I joined up with the supercomputing people for a little while.....our task was supposed to be to write a program that would prove the existence of dark matter or something. We talked with this crazy professor guy who had one and a half arms about it, I didn't understand any of the super complex sciency stuff he went on about. We totally failed btw, our team sucked, all we did was mess around and pull pranks.

lol, well even if u didnt succed, it sounded like great fun.

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Originally Posted by Smiling Demon

lol, well even if u didnt succed, it sounded like great fun.

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Yeah. Dark matter is an awesome subject if you want to look into it. Really blows your mind.

It was fun lol. We weren't graded or anything, we just didn't take home any prizes. I remember when we were at the supercomputing convention thing we threw like a hundred or more paper airplanes out our window in the room they had us in. Hilarious, they were all over the parking lot and field.

I think the reason there is so much support about the theory of dark matter is because without the gravity from dark matter or *something* else, there would not be strong enough gravity with just the planets and sun to hold everything together as it has been.

Dark matter, from what I understand, was the explanation for why certain formations held together instead of drifting apart.

It's invisible, so very difficult to detect. The way astronomers detect it is by how light sources behind the dark matter are affected by the gravity. So the pic of what we see in the link is a big enough concentration of dark matter to cause the light sources behind it to form that ring shape. What we see in the pic isn't the dark matter but is the light bending around it.

that's really interesting shit.

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Originally Posted by John

I think the reason there is so much support about the theory of dark matter is because without the gravity from dark matter or *something* else, there would not be strong enough gravity with just the planets and sun to hold everything together as it has been.

Dark matter, from what I understand, was the explanation for why certain formations held together instead of drifting apart.

It's invisible, so very difficult to detect. The way astronomers detect it is by how light sources behind the dark matter are affected by the gravity. So the pic of what we see in the link is a big enough concentration of dark matter to cause the light sources behind it to form that ring shape. What we see in the pic isn't the dark matter but is the light bending around it.

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yeh thats exactly what it is, i might go and look up that New Scientist article now, and c wat it says lol.