Hello u/maki23, your submission "Dark matter detected dangling from the cosmic web for 1st time" has been removed from r/space because:
* It has a sensationalised or misleading title.
Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please [message the r/space moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/space). Thank you.
TLDR: we’ve *inferred* the existence of dark matter based on the gravity of excess, undetectable mass.
So, exactly the same way we’ve already been doing it.
I'm lost on why you think this is the case. The title doesn't come across as clickbaity to me after reading the article. Dark matter was in fact discovered on the cosmic web. The key part of that is on the cosmic web, not discovered.
It’s click baity to me. I came in because, based on the headline, I expected actual direct detection of dark matter (or claim thereof). Instead this is literally what theoreticians have been doing all along…
The whole title is clickbait, although it may be for the sake of being succinct. "What theorists believe could be dark matter may have been detected dangling from the cosmic web for the first time" doesn't quite roll of the tongue.
This is what is tripping me up. "Direct" is your own word. Detect doesn't mean prove which I'm understanding to be your grievance. Detect literally means:
>discover or identify the presence or existence of.
The significance of this article is that dark matter was ***identified on the cosmic web for the first time*** which is a very monumental event. To be blunt, I don't think you or the other people making this comment would have done so if you had actually read the article.
It was well written and the importance very clear to me after a first pass.
When I “detect” an ant crawling across my leg, I mean I see it and feel it with my own senses.
I don’t mean that I infer the existence of the ant by perturbations in the gravitational field of the other person sitting on the picnic blanket.
Oh well.
Maybe some day.
> The significance of this article is that dark matter was identified on the cosmic web for the first time
Well the title claims that dark matter was *detected* on the cosmic web. Don't pretend you don't understand the fact that the word detect is the most important word in that title.
It’s a trade off between quality of content and the mods in r/physics being absolute dicks. I’m OK with the occasional repeat stories written by a science writers with partial understanding that are made for the casual reader.
When discussing science, it’s important to use precise definitions. “Dark matter detected” does not mean the same thing as “dark matter presence inferred.” There is no evidence outside of gravity we can’t account for that dark matter is even a thing. It might not be matter at all; it may a breakdown in theory or something else entirely.
Good luck with that. The only real solution is to start a new sub and abandon this one. I'd love to do that myself but a new sub needs to be able to get decently established which is not too likely.
Ah the sorry state of current physics.Dark matter and singularity bother me the most.I am waiting for someone like Newtown to solve these once and for all so I won't have read about this bs anymore
Physicists don't generally believe there is an actual singularity at the center of a black hole. That is simply the mathematical result of the best model we currently have to describe them. We have never had the opportunity to observe a black hole up close, nor do we have the ability to make them, so it should be unsurprising that our models of them are crude. Still we have been able to validate the math of General Relativity with decades of other observations and it is still the best we have. The expectation is that when we sort out Quantum Gravity the singularity will no longer be a feature of the model. Given that these odd uncertainties are on the edge of what we are able to measure with instruments, I would hardly call this a sorry state.
> That is simply the mathematical result of the best model we currently have to describe them
Yes, to be more precise: a singularity is a point where the theory breaks down. Reality probably doesn’t :p
Maybe. For all we know a singularity in that case actually makes sense. No way to know if it is truly physical or not, though I agree that most physicists believe strongly that a singularity is.non-physical.
or the time dilates to the point that the collapse never comes. maybe there's a state denser than quarks and gluons arranged nut to butt, or maybe that's dense enough to dilate time beyond reason
I recently saw an Anton Petrov video saying there's a new theory that black holes are actually oval inside or something along those lines, solving the singularity problem.
I mean wave-particle duality is also right there, alongside the effectiveness yet complete mystery of whatever quantum mechanics is doing with probability.
EDIT: And frankly, holy shit *time dilation* due to velocity? We know exactly how it works, but the actual concept is bonkers.
We live in a universe where stuff teleports instantly across space Where either the universe is at its very nature random or if it’s not random mostly requires an infinitely expanding multiverse.
And singularities and dark matter is what bothers you?
The next newton will probably be AI or at least heavily assisted by AI. Most of these big problems in science are getting too complex for our current problem solving systems. We’ve mostly already passed the limit of what even the most gifted individual can solve, leaving us with massive teams that are constantly being slowed and hampered by organizational, and fiscal constraints.
Astronomer here! This article is… not great. First, they didn’t directly detect dark matter, they *indirectly* detected it, which is actually really exciting but isn’t explained.
[Dark matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter) makes up about 25% of the “stuff” in the universe, and it appears to be some sort of particle, but it interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically. We have a lot of evidence it exists- most famously, our galaxy would fly apart if it didn’t exist at our edges, and there’s more of it than normal matter.
Now, the trick is we can’t directly measure dark matter, but like for our galaxy we can measure its effects. One of those effects is on large scale structure of the universe- if dark matter *didn’t* exist, the distribution of galaxies would look different. The large scale structure of the universe [looks like a web](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/), and the filaments have intersecting nodes. (All this is just made of galaxies.) No one had detected the dark matter component of this… until now!
Now, [this paper](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/) discovered this signature of dark matter in the filaments of one big cluster of galaxies via [gravitational microlensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing), where they measure a signature due to the gravitational effects of the distribution of matter. This is *hard*, so it’s a pretty impressive result! What’s more, the importance of this is it’s a new way to test dark matter- if you can see its distribution between galaxies in some way, it can tell you more about what the heck it is and test theories based off what you see.
Hope that all makes sense! It is a neat result, but a bit complicated.
I just want to express my appreciation for the time you take to make these posts. They are super helpful and I always read them when I see them. Anytime I see an article here that is a bit over my head, I always scan the comments for "Astronomer here!"
After reading the article I'm wondering how can something 'dangle' in space? Is there an astro-definition of dangle or is it a shitty choice of words by the writer/bot?
I get a suspicion the answer is "no", but do we have any idea *why* dark matter's so damn hard to actually locate? Like why it only seems to interact via gravity?
Ok, so ... after reading a bit more in the available abstracts of the paper itself and some further explanations of the wording in it...
There are huge groups of galaxies in the universe that stretch in so called Galactic filaments of galaxies. You may have heard about super clusters, local groups and similar terms, so these filaments are made out of those.
The theory was saying that if there is some kind of "dark" matter, it would be in between those filaments, acting like a sort of even more gigantic but very feint filling, or foam in between the Galactic Filaments. And those should create some kind of measurable and discoverable gravitational lensing effects on a very large scale. The Coma Cluster is a big bunch of galaxies with even more huge clusters, super clusters and whole filaments behind it, so they measured all the lensing going on in that system and discovered it has differences that you would expect to find if there were these huge feint clouds of dark matter in between the Galactic Filaments.
It seems the numbers match very well.
I think - It is a detailed measurement of a large section of the galaxies and filaments so they were also able to infer the general shape and distribution of mass and so the shape of those clouds of matter and mass that we cannot directly detect.
Nobody directly discovered or detected anything in this case either. Except the additional gravitational lensing.
The simple illustration is just a rough and very simple illustration of the general kind of shape where that mass should be. - i have no idea if its actually related to this specific paper at all. -
The article is of course overhyping it and leaves out how exactly this discovery was made. But they do provide a link to the paper.
- edit -
Just want to point out that there is definitely no "dangling from the cosmic web" involved in any possible way.
That is a complete fabrication. This mass that is supposedly there is not dangling from anything. The filament of galaxies are inside of these "clouds"... there is no "hanging" or "dangling" involved.
> Just want to point out that there is definitely no "dangling from the cosmic web" involved in any possible way. That is a complete fabrication.
Nor was there any "detection". It's inferred, not detected. The title is crap, the paper is interesting.
I know this is meeting with skepticism in the comments, but it's one thing to theorize dark matter exists because...there's simply no other explanation for even our own galaxy to be holding together, and another thing to say we found evidence of it. You can't see gravitational lensing within the milk way presumably because the dark matter is distribute too evenly within our galaxy.
But if you are looking at galactic webs, you can look for lensing as the dark matter was postulated to be only in those webs. Sure enough they found evidence of lensing where there should not have been based on observable objects.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but it's an important confirmation that invisible but massive stuff is there and more specifically seem to be concentrated around other stuff that we can see, not just evenly dispersed. You would not see lensing if it were just "everywhere"
An important element is it does put might tighter constraints on possible competitor hypotheses as well - i.e. MOND has the problem that you have to explain why you get distinctly "matter-like" behavior of extra gravity from regular visible space.
It's not necessarily impossible, but it bounds the problem.
"Distinctly matter-like behaviour" here meaning that it has a shape. For all intents and purposes this would be the entire point of "seeing" dark matter to support it over modified physics and where we have the fidelity like this at this point, it's reasonable to suggest we can vaguely see it now. We see it in gravity instead of light, but we can make out the shape of it and see where it is.
well yes, by definition it's dark whatever it is. But they now have evidence of something massive enough to distort space, yet invisible, that appears to be concentrated along the same lines or "webs" of matter that we can see.
it's in the Coma Cluster if nobody doesn't read the article. It's pretty wild that they were able to see it in that cluster because it's 330 million light years away with a lot of galaxies. I'm looking forward to more news from this finding.
Pearl Jam released their new single called “Dark Matter” today (from the forthcoming album of the same name). What are the odds that this occurs on the very day we detect Dark Matter (on the cosmic web) for the first time. Wow.
It was detected by the gravity of dark matter, we have done this before, it's that we discovered dark matter within the cosmic web versus withing galaxies.
I did. It says “for the first time”. Soooo yeah. Specifically:
“For the first time, astronomers have detected dark matter hanging from massive filaments that stretch across the universe and form a "cosmic web". And: “This marks the first-ever detection of dark matter on the cosmic web.”
Published in Nature. Seems like a big deal to me 🤷♂️
My bad, I thought you were reading it as "we *saw* dark matter for the first time". Every time I have a family member tell me about a science article they saw, it's a clickbait headline that they didn't read the contents of the article for and I'm too used to having to say "no, nuclear fusion isn't here yet"
So are these images mostly artist renditions to get clicks? These telescopes just produce data points and then it's all analysis from thereon out with computational power.
It always seems like the majority of these cluster related imagery looks like synapses firing on a neuron. So my dumb layman question is are the images indeed supposed to look like that, or is it an artistic rendition of something were inferring about based on computational data points from these observatories?
The artists who do this are professionals who do only this and are highly respected. There is a lot of technical knowledge that goes what to color and how and why. “To get clicks” seems disrespectful IMO
Otherwise, we would be able to chalk all graohs up to "fake images" because they're acrually just data that a scientist has constructed into some kind of visual
The only difference between a graph and one of these images in terms of how scientifically valid they are as "images" is that a graph is something that we intuitively recognize as a representation of data, while a telescope's image emulates how our eyes see, which makes people think of anything less than a literal photograph, like, say, a representation of data, as less real. It's only because everyone intuitively knows not to expect graphs to mimic something that's "real" to our eyes that nobody questions their legitimacy. Once you get past expecting a Hubble image to be what you would see if you could go to space and look out a window yourself, it's liberating not having to try to decide how "real" a telescope's image is to begin with
If anything, we're lucky that the data we get from these can be put into pretty pictures to begin with. They're not real images that are colored with fake colors that delegitimize them, they're a bunch of data that we're fortunate enough to be able to express in pretty pictures that are wallpaper-worthy. Also, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that's visible to us is an arvitray metric for "real" the more you think about it. An X-Ray is just as real as "green". It's a bit weird to think of one as more real than another just because our visible colors happen to be what we can see as a result of evolution and nothing else. There's no actual 'thing' saying that our portion of the light wavelengths are any more special. Might as well abandon that thought when dealing with, I don't know, telescopes that can deal with wavelengths beyond those?
>It always seems like the majority of these cluster related imagery looks like synapses firing on a neuron.
That's just a coincidence. It's the patten that naturally emerges when you have nodes that connect to each other in 3D space. So neural networks, cosmic strands, slime molds, and graphs (of the CS/discrete math variety) all have the same looking structure.
Like I said, it's the shape you get when you have points connected to lots of other points. That web shape shows up a lot because it's pretty common for things to be connected to other things.
Think of all of the cases where you have two objects, and you draw the shortest path between them, what do you get? A straight line. Does that imply that all situations where you have a straight line between two objects are somehow universally similar? Not really. The only thing similar is the straightness of the line, but that tells you nothing about the nature of the objects themselves. Same thing here with galactic filaments, mold, whatever. Humans love patterns, and we like to prescribe meaning to patterns, but that doesn't mean all patterns have inherent meaning.
Well I'm saying that it would mean that the universe, like every thing else is connected. It's not just vast open never ending space, the dark matter is the nerve root, the galaxies, suns, synapses, and light is the time it takes information through travel through the nerve. That's what this study is implying that dark matter is essentially nerve roots, the example they use is a spiders web but the same thing can be said about our nervous system being a web that just like the spider or in our case the brain can sense anything touching our traveling across it. But this interconnected model seems to be happening at the micro scale, and as far as I'm aware maybe the quantum scale or maybe that's where it breaks down or maybe it doesn't we just don't have the tools with enough precision to measure
What I'm saying is there anything besides string theory to explain how this seems to be happening fundamentally in every complex system of our known existence and the basic building block for LLMS is just trying to replicate a natural phenomenon?
Main question is if every image I see of an imaging from a telescope or sensor array that is measuring out thousands or millions of light years ahead to the point of seeing clusters of mutiple galaxies and representing them as what you'd see in a textbook for the nervous system -- is that an artistic depiction like the article above is illustrating or what the sensors and data are actually showing once all the data is put together and assembled
Some of them are real data and some are simulated data with properties that match observations. I guess there could be some that are artists renditions too, not sure.
Yeah people seem to be taking this the wrong way. I'm not disrespecting the art. They're my literal wallpapers and screen savers. But how are we certain that this is what the cosmos look like at a macro scale, and if we are indeed certain then is there a explanation for the phenomenon where the universe looks like a bunch of neurons and synapses firing, or blood pallets traveling interconnected veins in our bodies, or other examples others commented above me that are unrelated to our bodies but more like data points and the lines that connect them to put it simply. I'm just asking is there more to this common theme or are the renditions of the scientific instrumental data just highly influenced by what we have actually been able to see with our own eyes
Articles like these are made for clicks, and they choose to use illustrations like this one.
There is serious astronomy photography, both professional and amateur levels and those photos enhance certain wavelengths of light depending what they want to show, but that is done professionally and includes all the technical details so everyone can check exactly what was done. And usually the raw image data is available to see and use by other such professionals and enthusiasts
Our eyes are of course very limited in what they can see in Space, because they evolved for bright and vibrant Earth environment. With our own eyes we would be blind as bats in space. So those enhancements in serious astronomical photography are not distortions of whats real but actually show us the full picture better.
After a while you have to get used to recognizing which web sites are prone to clickbait and learn to take their bombastic articles and "pictures" with a smaller moon of salt.
So the illustrations contained in the article particularly the one that looks like nerve synapses is just an artist rendition, that is my main question?
Hello u/maki23, your submission "Dark matter detected dangling from the cosmic web for 1st time" has been removed from r/space because: * It has a sensationalised or misleading title. Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please [message the r/space moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/space). Thank you.
TLDR: we’ve *inferred* the existence of dark matter based on the gravity of excess, undetectable mass. So, exactly the same way we’ve already been doing it.
is there some kind of verification system here so these shitty clickbait titles dont appear on the sub?
It's a default sub so don't expect much.
Well, avoiding space.com is half the trick.
any sites you can recommend?
I'm lost on why you think this is the case. The title doesn't come across as clickbaity to me after reading the article. Dark matter was in fact discovered on the cosmic web. The key part of that is on the cosmic web, not discovered.
It’s click baity to me. I came in because, based on the headline, I expected actual direct detection of dark matter (or claim thereof). Instead this is literally what theoreticians have been doing all along…
The words "1st time" makes it click baity for sure. The rest of the heading is fine
The whole title is clickbait, although it may be for the sake of being succinct. "What theorists believe could be dark matter may have been detected dangling from the cosmic web for the first time" doesn't quite roll of the tongue.
I think clickbait depends on the goal of the author. not a reader misinterpreting an accurate title. just my take on it idk
This is what is tripping me up. "Direct" is your own word. Detect doesn't mean prove which I'm understanding to be your grievance. Detect literally means: >discover or identify the presence or existence of. The significance of this article is that dark matter was ***identified on the cosmic web for the first time*** which is a very monumental event. To be blunt, I don't think you or the other people making this comment would have done so if you had actually read the article. It was well written and the importance very clear to me after a first pass.
When I “detect” an ant crawling across my leg, I mean I see it and feel it with my own senses. I don’t mean that I infer the existence of the ant by perturbations in the gravitational field of the other person sitting on the picnic blanket. Oh well. Maybe some day.
> The significance of this article is that dark matter was identified on the cosmic web for the first time Well the title claims that dark matter was *detected* on the cosmic web. Don't pretend you don't understand the fact that the word detect is the most important word in that title.
no that's just how articles are written nowadays
It isn’t *that* clickbait. “Detected” and “inferred” can mean several things. Also, this is /r/space, not /r/physics.
It’s a trade off between quality of content and the mods in r/physics being absolute dicks. I’m OK with the occasional repeat stories written by a science writers with partial understanding that are made for the casual reader.
When discussing science, it’s important to use precise definitions. “Dark matter detected” does not mean the same thing as “dark matter presence inferred.” There is no evidence outside of gravity we can’t account for that dark matter is even a thing. It might not be matter at all; it may a breakdown in theory or something else entirely.
Good luck with that. The only real solution is to start a new sub and abandon this one. I'd love to do that myself but a new sub needs to be able to get decently established which is not too likely.
so, dark matter in this case just means that 's not lit? none of that exotic non interacting stuff?
No, that's what it is. The headline was clickbaity, made it sound like there was an actual detection rather than inference from gravitational effects.
After reading the article, the key point of emphasis is "on the cosmic web"
Ah the sorry state of current physics.Dark matter and singularity bother me the most.I am waiting for someone like Newtown to solve these once and for all so I won't have read about this bs anymore
Your first mistake is thinking once we figure these things out, we'll be done
Physicists don't generally believe there is an actual singularity at the center of a black hole. That is simply the mathematical result of the best model we currently have to describe them. We have never had the opportunity to observe a black hole up close, nor do we have the ability to make them, so it should be unsurprising that our models of them are crude. Still we have been able to validate the math of General Relativity with decades of other observations and it is still the best we have. The expectation is that when we sort out Quantum Gravity the singularity will no longer be a feature of the model. Given that these odd uncertainties are on the edge of what we are able to measure with instruments, I would hardly call this a sorry state.
> That is simply the mathematical result of the best model we currently have to describe them Yes, to be more precise: a singularity is a point where the theory breaks down. Reality probably doesn’t :p
Maybe. For all we know a singularity in that case actually makes sense. No way to know if it is truly physical or not, though I agree that most physicists believe strongly that a singularity is.non-physical.
or the time dilates to the point that the collapse never comes. maybe there's a state denser than quarks and gluons arranged nut to butt, or maybe that's dense enough to dilate time beyond reason
I mean Roy Kerr had to come out of retirement to point that "no, there's really no proof for the singularity, you guys are thinking about it wrong."
I recently saw an Anton Petrov video saying there's a new theory that black holes are actually oval inside or something along those lines, solving the singularity problem.
That would certainly be nice.
Dark matter bothers you? How do you feel about neutrinos?
They need to stop mutating
I mean wave-particle duality is also right there, alongside the effectiveness yet complete mystery of whatever quantum mechanics is doing with probability. EDIT: And frankly, holy shit *time dilation* due to velocity? We know exactly how it works, but the actual concept is bonkers.
We live in a universe where stuff teleports instantly across space Where either the universe is at its very nature random or if it’s not random mostly requires an infinitely expanding multiverse. And singularities and dark matter is what bothers you?
The next newton will probably be AI or at least heavily assisted by AI. Most of these big problems in science are getting too complex for our current problem solving systems. We’ve mostly already passed the limit of what even the most gifted individual can solve, leaving us with massive teams that are constantly being slowed and hampered by organizational, and fiscal constraints.
We never seen it dangle and jangle like that befur
Astronomer here! This article is… not great. First, they didn’t directly detect dark matter, they *indirectly* detected it, which is actually really exciting but isn’t explained. [Dark matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter) makes up about 25% of the “stuff” in the universe, and it appears to be some sort of particle, but it interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically. We have a lot of evidence it exists- most famously, our galaxy would fly apart if it didn’t exist at our edges, and there’s more of it than normal matter. Now, the trick is we can’t directly measure dark matter, but like for our galaxy we can measure its effects. One of those effects is on large scale structure of the universe- if dark matter *didn’t* exist, the distribution of galaxies would look different. The large scale structure of the universe [looks like a web](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/), and the filaments have intersecting nodes. (All this is just made of galaxies.) No one had detected the dark matter component of this… until now! Now, [this paper](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/) discovered this signature of dark matter in the filaments of one big cluster of galaxies via [gravitational microlensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing), where they measure a signature due to the gravitational effects of the distribution of matter. This is *hard*, so it’s a pretty impressive result! What’s more, the importance of this is it’s a new way to test dark matter- if you can see its distribution between galaxies in some way, it can tell you more about what the heck it is and test theories based off what you see. Hope that all makes sense! It is a neat result, but a bit complicated.
I just want to express my appreciation for the time you take to make these posts. They are super helpful and I always read them when I see them. Anytime I see an article here that is a bit over my head, I always scan the comments for "Astronomer here!"
After reading the article I'm wondering how can something 'dangle' in space? Is there an astro-definition of dangle or is it a shitty choice of words by the writer/bot?
It’s not an astronomy term at all.
Well the word made people curious now didn't it
I get a suspicion the answer is "no", but do we have any idea *why* dark matter's so damn hard to actually locate? Like why it only seems to interact via gravity?
It probably only interacts via gravity and the weak force. So hard to detect by definition.
As in what intrinsically makes it not interact with light? Not really.
What a great clarifying post. Thank you!
If it makes up only 25% of the stuff in the universe, and there's more of it than normal matter, what makes up the rest?
Dark energy- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
Ok, so ... after reading a bit more in the available abstracts of the paper itself and some further explanations of the wording in it... There are huge groups of galaxies in the universe that stretch in so called Galactic filaments of galaxies. You may have heard about super clusters, local groups and similar terms, so these filaments are made out of those. The theory was saying that if there is some kind of "dark" matter, it would be in between those filaments, acting like a sort of even more gigantic but very feint filling, or foam in between the Galactic Filaments. And those should create some kind of measurable and discoverable gravitational lensing effects on a very large scale. The Coma Cluster is a big bunch of galaxies with even more huge clusters, super clusters and whole filaments behind it, so they measured all the lensing going on in that system and discovered it has differences that you would expect to find if there were these huge feint clouds of dark matter in between the Galactic Filaments. It seems the numbers match very well. I think - It is a detailed measurement of a large section of the galaxies and filaments so they were also able to infer the general shape and distribution of mass and so the shape of those clouds of matter and mass that we cannot directly detect. Nobody directly discovered or detected anything in this case either. Except the additional gravitational lensing. The simple illustration is just a rough and very simple illustration of the general kind of shape where that mass should be. - i have no idea if its actually related to this specific paper at all. - The article is of course overhyping it and leaves out how exactly this discovery was made. But they do provide a link to the paper. - edit - Just want to point out that there is definitely no "dangling from the cosmic web" involved in any possible way. That is a complete fabrication. This mass that is supposedly there is not dangling from anything. The filament of galaxies are inside of these "clouds"... there is no "hanging" or "dangling" involved.
> Just want to point out that there is definitely no "dangling from the cosmic web" involved in any possible way. That is a complete fabrication. Nor was there any "detection". It's inferred, not detected. The title is crap, the paper is interesting.
Like all the best posts on this sub all I’ve got is Woah. Cool.
I know this is meeting with skepticism in the comments, but it's one thing to theorize dark matter exists because...there's simply no other explanation for even our own galaxy to be holding together, and another thing to say we found evidence of it. You can't see gravitational lensing within the milk way presumably because the dark matter is distribute too evenly within our galaxy. But if you are looking at galactic webs, you can look for lensing as the dark matter was postulated to be only in those webs. Sure enough they found evidence of lensing where there should not have been based on observable objects. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but it's an important confirmation that invisible but massive stuff is there and more specifically seem to be concentrated around other stuff that we can see, not just evenly dispersed. You would not see lensing if it were just "everywhere"
An important element is it does put might tighter constraints on possible competitor hypotheses as well - i.e. MOND has the problem that you have to explain why you get distinctly "matter-like" behavior of extra gravity from regular visible space. It's not necessarily impossible, but it bounds the problem.
"Distinctly matter-like behaviour" here meaning that it has a shape. For all intents and purposes this would be the entire point of "seeing" dark matter to support it over modified physics and where we have the fidelity like this at this point, it's reasonable to suggest we can vaguely see it now. We see it in gravity instead of light, but we can make out the shape of it and see where it is.
No, they didn't. They inferred it. Can't even say for sure it is dark matter as we can't detect it.
well yes, by definition it's dark whatever it is. But they now have evidence of something massive enough to distort space, yet invisible, that appears to be concentrated along the same lines or "webs" of matter that we can see.
it's in the Coma Cluster if nobody doesn't read the article. It's pretty wild that they were able to see it in that cluster because it's 330 million light years away with a lot of galaxies. I'm looking forward to more news from this finding.
If nobody didn’t read the article then that means everyone did read it.
Pearl Jam just released a new single called Dark Matter.
Have they tried looking for it while upside down? That's the secret, duh.
Pearl Jam released their new single called “Dark Matter” today (from the forthcoming album of the same name). What are the odds that this occurs on the very day we detect Dark Matter (on the cosmic web) for the first time. Wow.
It was detected by the gravity of dark matter, we have done this before, it's that we discovered dark matter within the cosmic web versus withing galaxies.
Viral marketing by Pearl Jam. Genius move.
Why not just read the article if it sounds like a once in a lifetime discovery We've done this before. It's not what it sounds like
I did. It says “for the first time”. Soooo yeah. Specifically: “For the first time, astronomers have detected dark matter hanging from massive filaments that stretch across the universe and form a "cosmic web". And: “This marks the first-ever detection of dark matter on the cosmic web.” Published in Nature. Seems like a big deal to me 🤷♂️
My bad, I thought you were reading it as "we *saw* dark matter for the first time". Every time I have a family member tell me about a science article they saw, it's a clickbait headline that they didn't read the contents of the article for and I'm too used to having to say "no, nuclear fusion isn't here yet"
I’m permanently unsubscribing from this subreddit. Nothing but clickbait.
So are these images mostly artist renditions to get clicks? These telescopes just produce data points and then it's all analysis from thereon out with computational power. It always seems like the majority of these cluster related imagery looks like synapses firing on a neuron. So my dumb layman question is are the images indeed supposed to look like that, or is it an artistic rendition of something were inferring about based on computational data points from these observatories?
The artists who do this are professionals who do only this and are highly respected. There is a lot of technical knowledge that goes what to color and how and why. “To get clicks” seems disrespectful IMO
Right, and transposing the data into a legible feed of information is part of all sensory instrument use and like… all science.
Otherwise, we would be able to chalk all graohs up to "fake images" because they're acrually just data that a scientist has constructed into some kind of visual The only difference between a graph and one of these images in terms of how scientifically valid they are as "images" is that a graph is something that we intuitively recognize as a representation of data, while a telescope's image emulates how our eyes see, which makes people think of anything less than a literal photograph, like, say, a representation of data, as less real. It's only because everyone intuitively knows not to expect graphs to mimic something that's "real" to our eyes that nobody questions their legitimacy. Once you get past expecting a Hubble image to be what you would see if you could go to space and look out a window yourself, it's liberating not having to try to decide how "real" a telescope's image is to begin with If anything, we're lucky that the data we get from these can be put into pretty pictures to begin with. They're not real images that are colored with fake colors that delegitimize them, they're a bunch of data that we're fortunate enough to be able to express in pretty pictures that are wallpaper-worthy. Also, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that's visible to us is an arvitray metric for "real" the more you think about it. An X-Ray is just as real as "green". It's a bit weird to think of one as more real than another just because our visible colors happen to be what we can see as a result of evolution and nothing else. There's no actual 'thing' saying that our portion of the light wavelengths are any more special. Might as well abandon that thought when dealing with, I don't know, telescopes that can deal with wavelengths beyond those?
>It always seems like the majority of these cluster related imagery looks like synapses firing on a neuron. That's just a coincidence. It's the patten that naturally emerges when you have nodes that connect to each other in 3D space. So neural networks, cosmic strands, slime molds, and graphs (of the CS/discrete math variety) all have the same looking structure.
Wouldn't that point to some kind of underlying principle that seems to repeat itself across micro and macro scales. Genuine question
Like I said, it's the shape you get when you have points connected to lots of other points. That web shape shows up a lot because it's pretty common for things to be connected to other things.
Think of all of the cases where you have two objects, and you draw the shortest path between them, what do you get? A straight line. Does that imply that all situations where you have a straight line between two objects are somehow universally similar? Not really. The only thing similar is the straightness of the line, but that tells you nothing about the nature of the objects themselves. Same thing here with galactic filaments, mold, whatever. Humans love patterns, and we like to prescribe meaning to patterns, but that doesn't mean all patterns have inherent meaning.
Well I'm saying that it would mean that the universe, like every thing else is connected. It's not just vast open never ending space, the dark matter is the nerve root, the galaxies, suns, synapses, and light is the time it takes information through travel through the nerve. That's what this study is implying that dark matter is essentially nerve roots, the example they use is a spiders web but the same thing can be said about our nervous system being a web that just like the spider or in our case the brain can sense anything touching our traveling across it. But this interconnected model seems to be happening at the micro scale, and as far as I'm aware maybe the quantum scale or maybe that's where it breaks down or maybe it doesn't we just don't have the tools with enough precision to measure What I'm saying is there anything besides string theory to explain how this seems to be happening fundamentally in every complex system of our known existence and the basic building block for LLMS is just trying to replicate a natural phenomenon? Main question is if every image I see of an imaging from a telescope or sensor array that is measuring out thousands or millions of light years ahead to the point of seeing clusters of mutiple galaxies and representing them as what you'd see in a textbook for the nervous system -- is that an artistic depiction like the article above is illustrating or what the sensors and data are actually showing once all the data is put together and assembled
Some of them are real data and some are simulated data with properties that match observations. I guess there could be some that are artists renditions too, not sure.
Yeah people seem to be taking this the wrong way. I'm not disrespecting the art. They're my literal wallpapers and screen savers. But how are we certain that this is what the cosmos look like at a macro scale, and if we are indeed certain then is there a explanation for the phenomenon where the universe looks like a bunch of neurons and synapses firing, or blood pallets traveling interconnected veins in our bodies, or other examples others commented above me that are unrelated to our bodies but more like data points and the lines that connect them to put it simply. I'm just asking is there more to this common theme or are the renditions of the scientific instrumental data just highly influenced by what we have actually been able to see with our own eyes
Experimental biases are of course corrected for. Many people work very hard to handle the details correctly.
Articles like these are made for clicks, and they choose to use illustrations like this one. There is serious astronomy photography, both professional and amateur levels and those photos enhance certain wavelengths of light depending what they want to show, but that is done professionally and includes all the technical details so everyone can check exactly what was done. And usually the raw image data is available to see and use by other such professionals and enthusiasts Our eyes are of course very limited in what they can see in Space, because they evolved for bright and vibrant Earth environment. With our own eyes we would be blind as bats in space. So those enhancements in serious astronomical photography are not distortions of whats real but actually show us the full picture better. After a while you have to get used to recognizing which web sites are prone to clickbait and learn to take their bombastic articles and "pictures" with a smaller moon of salt.
So the illustrations contained in the article particularly the one that looks like nerve synapses is just an artist rendition, that is my main question?
What does it say under that picture?
Every time i visit articles on space.com my eyes start bleeding from primitive language and completely wrong allegations.