81–90 of 131 posts
"Both teams took advantage of a phenomenon called the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect that occurs when light left over from the big bang passes through hot gas." That just seems unreal to me. Edit: To clarify, I'm not accusing it of being made up. I just think it's amazing.
"Both teams took advantage of a phenomenon called the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect that occurs when light left over from the big bang passes through hot gas." That just seems unreal to me. Edit: To clarify, I'm not accusing it of being made up. I just think it's amazing.
When we look further out into space, we effectively look "back" into time because of the limit of the speed of light. The older the light, the more it has redshifted because the more space has expanded while it was travelling. So this redshift increases very predictably the further we look out into space and back into time.
As a result, when observing space we can say when light is left-over from the big bang, because we can tell the age of the light by how much its spectral lines have redshifted.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
I guess we really are created in his image...
"made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter" That's clumsily worded, as it makes it sound like it's still something exotic. _We're_ made of baryons: this is just normal matter.
As a former physics student, I see your point but disagree. Apologies for the wall of text about just this one choice of wording, but discussing why science communication is a very difficult trade-off takes a bit of space. One reason to stick to "baryons" is that it is the term used by the researchers in their papers. So it is more true to the research that is being summarised. The start of the article (unlike its ti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should vacuum expand? Is it due to gravity of the filament molecules pulling those molecules together into larger 'strings' or 'planes' which leave 'holes'? Or some other mechanism?
The universe expands. Things bound by gravity tend not to expand that much. As a result, most of the space that expands is vacuum.
Ok, it seems like a lot of people here think dark matter is a “thing” but it’s not. Dark matter is simply unaccounted for mass in the universe. When we discover mass that we didn’t know about before, the amount of “dark” matter decreases. The word “dark” here merely means “known unknown” because we observe the effect but not the cause. This discovery has unveiled some of the dark matter as baryon particles in a plasm…
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We should assume by default that every headline is clickbait now, unfortunately this is the business model of the internet. It's not good for accuracy and most articles are just a headline and some inane filler up words. I hope we'll smart up and find a better model for news soon. :/
We could pay for it like we did for the hundreds of years prior to the internet, but they'll still make-up eye-grabbing headlines.
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Interesting, thanks. So what's preventing "dark matter" from simply being, say, lots of photons traveling through intergalactic space then? That seems like the next obvious candidate after ordinary matter.
If dark matter where a lot of photons, then we could detect it. For example the experiments to detect the cosmic microwave background radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background can detect a very small amount of light that is the leftover of the radiation produced soon after the big bang. We have very good estimations of how many photons are out there.
The title is effectively click-bait because of: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/75944s/half_the_univ...