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The Next Big Discovery in Astronomy? We Probably Found It Years Ago — But Don't Know It Yet By Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County | June 3, 2018 08:44am ET MORE An artist's illustration of a black hole "eating" a star.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy. The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren't from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were...

"We Truly Don't Know What It Is" --Mystery Milky-Way Spectrum of Light Observed 'Not Produced By Any Known Emission' April 17, 2018   "We use special telescopes to catch X-ray light in the sky, and while looking at these X-rays, the telescopes noticed an unexpected feature and captured a spectrum of light, which is not produced by any known atomic emission," said University of Miami astrophysicist Nico Cappelluti. "This emission line is now called the 3.5 kiloelectron volt (keV). One interpretation of this emission line is that it's produced by the decay of dark matter." "This 3.5 keV emission line is...

Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered a nearby galaxy that apparently has little or no evidence of dark matter. The unique galaxy, called NGC 1052-DF2, contains at most 1/400th the amount of dark matter that astronomers had expected. The galaxy is as large as our Milky Way, but it had escaped attention because it contains only 1/200th the number of stars.

Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks. Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than we'd expect, as if they were actually much more massive than the stars we can see indicate. Astrophysicists have come up with two main solutions to this problem. Either there's a lot of mass out there in the universe that we can't detect directly, mass scientists call dark matter, or there's no...

Less than a billion years after the Big Bang, two titans speed toward each other. NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry ======================================================================= Just 780 million years after the universe formed in the Big Bang, two galaxies speed to confront each other in a head-on collision that will lead to a merger between the two—and one of them is towing along a clump of dark matter larger than any spotted before. The research paper, published today in Nature, highlights a little-understood era of the universe known as the Epoch of Reionization. This is when the first galaxies came together and lit up the universe...

The finding keeps open the possibility that the particles come from dark matter New observations of the whirling cores of dead stars have deepened the mystery behind a glut of antimatter particles raining down on Earth from space. The particles are antielectrons, also known as positrons, and could be a sign of dark matter — the exotic and unidentified culprit that makes up the bulk of the universe’s mass. But more mundane explanations are also plausible: Positrons might be spewed from nearby pulsars, the spinning remnants of exploded stars, for example. But researchers with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or...

The recent finding, detailed in the journal Science today (Nov. 17), concerns positrons, the antimatter complements of electrons. High-energy particles, usually protons, traveling across the galaxy can create pairs of positrons and electrons when they interact with dust and gas in space, study co-author Hao Zhou, at Los Alamos National Lab, told Space.com. In 2008, the space-based PAMELA detector measured unexpectedly high numbers of earthbound positrons. This was about 10 times what they were expecting to see, according to Zhou. ... Zhou's team made detailed measurements of the gamma-rays coming from the direction of two nearby pulsars — Geminga and its companion...

To understand this problem, one needs to wrap one’s head around some celestial rotations. Our planet orbits the sun, which, in turn, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Inside solar systems, the gravitational pull from the mass of the sun and the speed of the planets are in balance. By Newton’s laws, this is why Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at over 100,000 miles per hour, while the outermost plant, Neptune, is crawling at just over 10,000 miles per hour. Now, you might assume that the same logic would apply to galaxies:...

Captured by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, the composite image is proof that dark matter acts as a giant intergalactic web that connects galaxies throughout space and time. Their findings were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Dark matter is an invisible force that doesn’t emit or reflect light, and is only detectable through gravity. It makes up around 27 percent of the observable universe and scientists have long predicted that the ghostly substance plays a crucial role in the makeup of our entire universe. “For decades, researchers have been predicting the existence...

Dark matter filaments bridge the space between galaxies in this false colour map. The locations of bright galaxies are shown by the white regions and the presence of a dark matter filament bridging the galaxies is shown in red. Credit: S. Epps & M. Hudson / University of Waterloo ================================================================================================================================ Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The composite image, which combines a number of individual...

A new WikiLeaks Vault 7 leak titled “Dark Matter” claims that the Central Intelligence Agency has been bugging “factory fresh” iPhones since at least 2008 through suppliers. The documents are expected to be released after a 10 a.m. EDT “press briefing” that WikiLeaks promoted on its Twitter. And here is the full press release from WikiLeaks: Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Dark Matter", which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac Computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA's Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents...

23 March, 2017 Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Dark Matter", which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac Computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA's Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain 'persistence' on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones and demonstrate their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware. Among others, these documents reveal the "Sonic Screwdriver" project which, as explained by the CIA, is a "mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac...

A new WikiLeaks Vault 7 leak titled “Dark Matter” claims, with unreleased documents, that the Central Intelligence Agency has been bugging “factory fresh” iPhones since at least 2008. WikiLeaks further claims that the CIA has the capability to permanently bug iPhones, even if their operating systems are deleted or replaced.The documents are expected to be released after a 10 a.m. EDT “press briefing” that WikiLeaks promoted on its Twitter. RELEASE: CIA #Vault7 "Dark Matter" https://t.co/pgnfeODXVB pic.twitter.com/vkI16f3vMD— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 23, 2017 Watch a livestream of the Julian Assange led event here. WATCH: WikiLeaks Vault 7 Livestream on CIA ‘Dark Matter’...

Dark matter remains largely mysterious, but astrophysicists keep trying to crack open that mystery. Last year’s discovery of gravity waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) may have opened up a new window into the dark matter mystery. Enter what are known as ‘primordial black holes.’ ... Unlike stellar black holes, primordial black holes originated in high density fluctuations of matter during the first moments of the Universe. They can be much larger, or smaller, than stellar black holes. PBHs could be as small as asteroids or as large as 30 solar masses, even larger. They could also...

In a recent survey of mini-spiral galaxies, astronomers found a unexpected relationship between dark and light matter. The relationship is easy to measure yet impossible to explain using the Standard Model of physics. Researchers from Italy's International School for Advanced Studies conducted a statistical analysis of three dozen mini-spiral galaxies. Their work revealed a strong correlation between the organization of dark and regular matter in each galaxy. If, for example, ordinary matter was condensed at the center of a mini-spiral galaxy, so too was dark matter. If the bulk of regular matter was scattered across the outskirts of the galaxy,...

Dark matter caused the demise of the dinosaurs? by John G. Hartnett Published: 13 December 2016 (GMT+10) Harvard University LisaRandallHarvardEdu American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Dr Lisa Randall is another scientist grasping at dark matter for answers. Dark matter has been invoked to solve many vexing problems in astrophysics and cosmology.1 Now it seems it has been invoked to solve the evolutionists’ problem of extinction of the dinosaurs.2 American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Dr Lisa Randall has developed a breakthrough five dimensional warped geometry theory. About two years ago she proposed a new hypothesis on dark matter which suggests the...

On this, the day after the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president (yes, he has already updated his Twitter profile), President Barack Obama’s 2016 Federal Register page count stands at a record-level 78,898.The Federal Register, so emblematic of Washington excess, is where the hundreds of Washington bureaucracies post their proposed and final rules and regulations each day.Obama will break his own all-time record of 81,405 pages even before December gets here. Of the ten highest-ever Federal Register page counts, the incumbent president will own seven of them.Within those pages, several thousand rules get issued annually, no matter...

Scientists are ecstatic over the fact that they may have just discovered the fifth fundamental force of nature. The possible discovery of a previously-unknown subatomic particle looks set to finally bring the elusive dark matter into the mix. The discovery centers on a new type of boson that possesses characteristics previously unseen in particles. Furthermore, its existence casts doubt upon whether the known ‘sector’ of matter and particles exists alongside a ‘dark’ sector – both interacting with each other via another, unseen force.“If true, it's revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy at the University of California, Irvine,...

How do you build a real-world machine to test the most abstract of theories? Janna Levin talks with Rai Weiss, one of the original designers of LIGO, the four-kilometer-long instrument that has now twice detected the distant reverberations of two black holes crashing into one another. Janna Levin is a theoretical physicist — she works with pen and paper to turn the elegant rules of the universe into theory. Rainer Weiss, or Rai, as he’s known, is an experimental physicist — he thinks about how to find and measure something that may or may not exist outside of theory. Weiss...

The idea that our Universe is filled with dark matter has been around for nearly a century. When astronomers noticed that orbital speeds towards the edges of spiral galaxies remain the same or even increase slightly, rather than decrease, they surmised that either there must be some huge unseen mass driving the rotation, or that the laws of gravity given by Einstein's General Relativity need to be changed. They elected the first option. Over that time, cosmologists have accumulated boatloads of evidence in favor of the notion that this invisible, "dark" matter -- which neither interacts with nor emits light...