Hubble Reveals Ghostly Ring of Dark Matter

Source: NASA

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.


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."


Researchers pointed the aging but powerful Hubble Space Telescope toward a cluster of galaxies known as cluster ZwCl0024+1652. At first glance, the then-unknown ring looked like a ripple in a pond over the twinkling galactic cluster.


"I was annoyed when I saw the ring because I thought it was an artifact," said Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University. But it wasn't a glitch, astronomers announced at a NASA press conference today.



Read more: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070515_dark_ring.html

Who knows. The Universe is so vast and complex, we may be perpetually trapped in the old story of the three blind men examining an elephant. What if all we'll ever know is what it feels to have one finger stuck in its trunk? "The Universe is wet and gooey and makes a horrific noise!"

He wasn't thinking it was a giant Super-Stargate created by The Ori.

:evilgrin:

IT's JERRY!!!

I love them and watch the Science Channel avidly every day.

Just a little gentle ribbing here today.

:rofl:

For years it has been believed that electric bulbs emitted light. However, recent information from Bell
Labs has proven otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light, they suck dark. Thus they now call these bulbs
dark suckers. The dark sucker theory, according to a Bell Labs spokesperson, proves the existence of
dark, that dark has mass heavier than that of light, and that dark is faster than light.

http://www.biology.emory.edu/Antia/ahandel/physicsfun/darksuckers.html

blasting howitzers for a couple of days.

I'll try beano next time. Promise.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/17/video/

very puzzling ... i would have thought it was an artifact too, at first glance.

Too bad the camera that took that image is dead. :(

will not realise how narrow-minded they really are.

if so, that is truly fucking absurd. good scientists, who are *always* skeptics, are quite aware of how much we don't know about the universe. the difference between us and the mystics, the pseudoscientists, the religious yahoos, and similar tools, is that we don't pretend to know things we don't.

and the people who discovered this? almost certainly skeptics. like all good skeptics, they kept their minds, and their eyes, open to evidence.

in a universal uterus.

a few months ago. After the Big Bang, no pun intended, the universe was full of debris; rocks and dust which gradually collected together to form the rocky planets such as Earth; pretty much circular in shape, but they were barren, not having the building blocks of life. This came along with millions of strikes from comets during the early formation of the universe. The comets brought frozen water and the organic compounds from which life sprang.

To me the shape and function of an egg and sperm cell are analogous to a rocky barren planet and a comet. The universe is expanding as would a pregnant female's uterus. I haven't come to terms yet as to what Black Holes represent whether it be birth canals or digestive tracts. I will let you know when I figure it out.:)

at some point in space and not at the white house?

apparently, we just saw it.

:hippie: