heads up - nasa 21 aug re: dark matter

just to let people know that nasa have a teleconference scheduled for 1pm EDT 21st aug where they will announce that they have managed to seperate dark matter from normal matter using high energy collision

im sure somebody more knowledgeable than me will fill you in on how important this really is

Oh really?

Will there be a live web broadcast of this? if so, can you link us to where exactly?

Dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries of the universe facing us. Some theories suggest it is the stuff that exists between galaxies, and its true nature continues to confound many people.

Wowser is all I can say to that.

Hope its not another one of those "We will use this in 100 years time because todays just a find not a tech development"

As a race we need space travel. As a race we need exploration and new horizons, or we will choke this beautiful planet under our mass.

I for one would love to see space put back in the frame and looking hard at humanities future with it.

theres not much info posted about it yet about it but the details are here - www.nasa.gov...

(for some reason the above link is only working when you copy & paste it into your browser)

* every time i hear them talk about dark matter it always reminds me of something an old friend of mine once said. he said that we knew all about the speed of light but did not know what the speed of dark was. * always made me chuckle

[edit on 17-8-2006 by justyc]
(mod edit to fix link)

[edit on 17-8-2006 by Byrd]

Originally posted by justyc
just to let people know that nasa have a teleconference scheduled for 1pm EDT 21st aug where they will announce that they have managed to seperate dark matter from normal matter using high energy collision

Uhm, not quite.

What the link says is:

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

So this has to do with the beginning of the Universe and how dark matter and normal matter were separated from each other at the occurence of the Big Bang.

So prior to the big bang, matter and dark matter were once one and the same form of matter and through this energetic collision they became forced apart?

Am I understanding this right? So now there's normal matter (really not that normal if 90% of the universe is dark matter), antimatter, and dark matter, and now some form of matter that has both dark and normal matter in it?

Originally posted by Byrd

Uhm, not quite.

What the link says is:

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

So this has to do with the beginning of the Universe and how dark matter and normal matter were separated from each other at the occurence of the Big Bang.

ahh, but i originally read the story on netscape news site which stated "It looks like NASA has found a way to separate dark and normal matter in a high energy collision. They are planning a teleconference to announce the discovery on August 21st." and i only linked the nasa page afterwards, so not really my fault if its wrong or worded badly. will be interesting to see what they say anyway

posted by Prot0n
So prior to the Big Bang, matter and dark matter were once one and the same form of matter and through this energetic collision they became forced apart? Am I understanding this right? [Edited by Don W]

Probably not.

So now there's normal matter (really not that normal if 90% of the universe is dark matter), antimatter, and dark matter, and now some form of matter that has both dark and normal matter in it?

I think you’re making it more complex than is indicated by the theorists. There is just dark matter and what you’re calling “normal” matter and its own anti-matter.

I believe the concept of “dark matter” was conjectured to explain why the expansion of the Universe is speeding up rather than what we’d expect, intuitively, if the expansion began at one singularity, i.e., the Big Bang more correctly described as the Very Rapid Expansion.

posted by justyc

posted by Byrd

Uhm, not quite. What the link says is:

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory astronomers will host a teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

This has to do with the beginning of the Universe and how dark matter and normal matter were separated from each other at the occurrence of the Big Bang.

I read the story on Netscape News which stated "It looks like NASA has found a way to separate dark and normal matter in a high energy collision. They are planning a teleconference to announce the discovery on August 21st." and I only linked the nasa page afterwards, so not really my fault if its wrong or worded badly. will be interesting to see what they say anyway

This is much more mundane, as I see it. More of a step by step program to ultimately understand what force is driving the Universe apart, rather than to locate some “stuff” we have not seen before. I’ll be watching the 1 PM telecast.

i'm not great with time zones, anyone know what time this is GMT?

the bbc website sums up the conference here
interesting stuff

More here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

really?
what is dark matter?

it's another form of matter, i read somewhere ages ago that if you could store enough to fill a small match box it would contain enough energy to destroy the world many times over?

Astronomers found the first direct evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter. Dark matter - which does not emit or reflect enough light to be "seen" - is thought to make up 25% of the Universe. Ordinary matter we can see is believed to make up no more than 5% of our Universe. Researchers discovered the gravitational signature of dark matter. This signature was created by dark matter and ordinary matter being wrenched apart by the immense collision of two large galaxy clusters.

Gravity puzzle
known since the 1930s that galaxy clusters have far too much gravity to be explained by the amount of visible matter in them the extra gravity has two possible explanations. 1) That most matter in the clusters is in a form we cannot see, because it does not absorb or emit light. 2) That gravity does not behave the same way in galaxy clusters as it does on Earth. Gas and galaxies in clusters are held together by gravity. In the cosmic smash-up known as the Bullet Cluster these components have been pulled apart. Astronomers were lucky to catch the collision just 100 million years after it occurred - the blink of an eye in cosmic time.

More mass in gas
If dark matter exists, astronomers expect to find the majority of it in clusters residing around the galaxies. But if dark matter does not exist, most of the galaxy cluster's mass would be in its hot gas. Galaxy clusters typically contain 10 times as much ordinary mass in gas as in stars. The researchers found most of the mass was located near the galaxies - ahead of the gas clouds - showing the dark matter really was there.

Some 70% of the Universe is composed of dark energy. It is an equally mysterious quantity which exerts negative pressure. Dark matter and dark energy are not what anyone would have expected starting from the perspective of what the Universe should be like. To locate the mass in the clusters, researchers used the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, along with the Very Large Telescope and Magellan optical telescopes in Chile. This was done by measuring the effect of gravitational lensing, where gravity from the clusters distorts light from background galaxies, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Confirmed yet one more time. From BBC News 8/22/2006

news.bbc.co.uk...

Just think, it was barely 3 years ago the “new” administration at NASA was ready to abandon the multi-billion dollar Hubble space telescope launched in 1990. Now #2 to Chandra, it was the best eyes on the Universe since Dutchman Hans Lipperhey made the first telescope which inspired Galileo to duplicate, and through which he found the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. See Note 1. NASA wanted to spend more of its money on a successor to the old, time worn shuttle fleet - say worn out - Which by the way, we learned the hard way we had overestimated the life span of shuttles by a factor of 2. Sorry about that, guys and gals.

Some including our own president have suggested we undertake to send humans to Mars and presumably, bring them back in one piece. It is not so much that humans to Mars would be the biggest boondoggle of all time - second only to moving the Mission Control Center to Houston - it is not really feasible with today’s technology. Maybe later.


Note 1. In 1610. Galileo Galilei was the first human to see the four moons of Jupiter. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Observing the moons revolving around Jupiter, his reporting of this brought trouble from the religious authorities which followed Aristotle’s teachings in explaining the heavens. The religionist taught the earth was the center of God’s Creation. The churchmen said everything revolved around the earth. Galileo showed that was not true. Not good for Galileo.

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[edit on 8/22/2006 by donwhite]

Here is an experiment where they are attempting to detect dark matter particles with a Laser beaming through a vacuum with a magnetic field, a wall, and another vacuum and magnetic field. The experiment would probably resemble a setup similiar to this.

Key: L = Laser, M = Magnetic Field, W = Wall, D = Photon Detector

L -> M -> W -> M -> D

The Basic Idea is this, when the laser gets shot through the first vacuum room with the first Magnetic Field, it is hypothesized that a certain portion will convert into Dark Matter and will pass right through the wall and interact with the second Vacuum magnetic field and be converted back into a photon and thusly will be detected by the photon detector, thusly proving once and for all there is something to this dark matter stuff afterall.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 31-8-2006 by sardion2000]