Catherine Heymans: You can’t listen to just the wind section of a symphony orchestra if you want to hear the full music.
Astronomer Catherine Heymans of the University of British Columbia is talking about how astronomers look beyond visible light – the light we can see – to study the universe. With the Hubble telescope, Heymans collected radio waves, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation coming from the Abell supercluster of galaxies 2.6 billion light-years from Earth.
Catherine Heymans: What we’re finding is very dense pools of dark matter that are pulling galaxies into this dense region of space.
Astronomers think that 85 percent of all matter in the entire universe is made of what they call ‘dark matter,’ which cannot be seen. They know dark matter by its gravity, which in the Abell supercluster yanks entire galaxies around.
Catherine Heymans: We can see galaxies changing as we go from the outskirts of the supercluster, like the suburbs of the city, into the center of the city, or the densest parts of the supercluster.
Closer to the ‘downtown’ of the supercluster…
Catherine Heymans: We’ve got great names. There’s a ‘strangulation,’ there’s ‘tidal stripping’ where their gas is ripped out of them as they fall onto hot gas.
Heymans said that the shadowy forces of gravity from dark matter pull these galaxies together, sometimes to the point where whole galaxies crash into each other.
Our thanks to:
Catherine Heymans
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
What passes for science among astrophysicists today is a mockery of the scientific method. Here we have something completely theoretical being talked about as though it were a proven fact. The reason scientists believe that up to 85% of all matter is dark matter is because otherwise they can’t explain why the law of gravity doesn’t work on large scales. And of course they can’t be wrong about something so basic, therefore dark matter must be the answer. There is absolutely no proof of the existence of dark matter and no existing theoretical model that explains it.
u are a star
dark matter is so cool. i think the concept of it is really neat!!
To Jim Gamble,
You are correct, but just because there is no proof of dark matter, should we not explore its possibility? Should we only explore what we already know?
The Brian Greene series The Elegant Universe addresses this issue under M-Theory. If you watch the show at PBS.org, you will need to watch the segment called Escaping Gravity. The whole series is worth watching, but under string theory there is the possibility that gravity affects dimensions that are not observable to us. The reverse could also be true under this conception of the universe, i.e. other dimensions would be able to affect our cosmos via gravity that is inexplicable.
One problem with string theory is that it may be nothing more than philosophy. And to scientists anything that smacks of philosophy is less than useless. After all, how do you test metaphysical concepts that defy a three dimensional universe?
To Kristie: yes of course we should continue to explore and keep an open mind concerning dark matter. It may actually exist, but I would like to see proof- gravitational effects that can’t be explained don’t qualify. The problem is we can’t confirm something as simple as the law of gravity, and if its wrong, we have no way to prove it. Here it is in a nutshell: We know the law of gravity works here on earth, on a small scale so we assume that the theory holds true for all masses. But we have no way to confirm or deny this, and the facts don’t support it. It may be that a small error could progress geometrically to produce a massive miscalculation; or, invisible particles that have mass but don’t interact are streaming through our bodies even as you read this. But Occam’s razor says its the former, not the latter.