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Author Topic: Dark matter found  (Read 9083 times)
Mugz the Sane
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #15 on: September 05, 2006, 08:28:37 am »

Possibly a stupid question, but my field is electronics/heavy industry so understandable.

What is the difference between dark matter and antimatter? And if they are different, what would the result of their interaction be?
Also, if dark matter's existence can be proven (I'm undecided either way) would it have practical application?
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Death 999
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #16 on: September 05, 2006, 03:39:05 pm »

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Scientists don't understand the rules that... scientists... made... oh, wait, that doesn't make any sense at all.

So then scientists have a collective consciousness? Thought scientists often disagreed on many theories' accuracies, I did.

Context, dude. The claim was posited that every scientist was unnecessarily postulating dark matter because they did not even understand basic elements of relativity. If at least one astrophysicist scientist were competent in their field, this claim is trashed.


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So, do you care to explain the way that galaxies are suspiciously failing to fly apart
under ther internal momentum,

I thought that super massive black holes were responsible for keeping galaxies together?

No, it's not enough. More to the point, it would make galaxies look very different than they actually look. Galactic rotation profiles are indicative of a distributed mass, not a central point mass.


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which is what Dark Matter's job is, mainly

It got layed off, black holes will do the same job for half the pay. Wink

A similar job, sure. But you can tell the difference, and this isn't the work of black holes.
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Death 999
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #17 on: September 05, 2006, 03:57:27 pm »

What is the difference between dark matter and antimatter?

Every kind of particle - electron, proton, neutron, photon, etc. has a particle which is its 'anti'. There are anti-electrons (a.k.a. positrons), anti-neutrons, etc. They have a variety of their properties reversed. In particular, charge. Mass, on the other hand, is not reversed.

So, if you have an anti-electron, it has +1 electron charge (as opposed to -1 for electrons). This means it is involved with electromagnetic interactions.

We have seen antimatter. We are making antimatter. Antimatter occurs naturally in small quantities in the upper atmosphere, but in general there is not very much of it at all.

This is due to one of the more notorious properties of antimatter, that it is capable of annihilating with the same kind of ordinary (non-anti) matter on contact (it doesn't need to do this right away, but in a matter-dominated environment, antimatter will not last long). When this happens, the mass of the two particles is released as energy in photons.

On the other hand, dark matter (if it exists) is ubiquitous. There is more dark matter than any other kind of matter, by several times. It doesn't have electric charge, though it may be involved in the 'weak' interactions that cause nuclear fission. We can't make it (yet), and we have never seen it directly.

And if they are different, what would the result of their interaction be?

Anti-dark-matter particles would annihilate with non-anti-dark-matter particles, probably via the weak interaction. Which means it would probably happen verry slowwwly.

Also, if dark matter's existence can be proven (I'm undecided either way) would it have practical application?

Depends what the particular properties are. Even if it's really useful for something, the apparatus for creating and manipulating them will be enormous, so it will only be used on extremely large projects.
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Deus Siddis
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #18 on: September 05, 2006, 04:58:06 pm »

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Anti-dark-matter particles would annihilate with non-anti-dark-matter particles, probably via the weak interaction. Which means it would probably happen verry slowwwly.

Alas, that would explain why there is so much more dark matter than normal matter. It would also help the theory that the spreading of the universe accelerates, because there is still plenty of anti-dark-matter to reduce the amount of (dark) objects with mass, and thus their gravitational pull. Is this already a real theory yet?

And if so, why has science come up with Dark Energy? If there wasn't even enough matter to explain universal binding forces, why did something else need to be created that does the opposite?
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #19 on: September 06, 2006, 08:47:15 am »

Quote from: D_999
non-anti-dark-matter particles

I approve of this way of naming things.  It makes everything better. Now if we could only work a void in with that non...

Yours truly

non-void-non-anti-Lukipela
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #20 on: September 06, 2006, 08:54:07 am »

Thank you for your input. It was most enlightening.

We've known about positrons for a long time, haven't we?
I wonder what the opposite of a neutral charge would be. An anti-neutron would be... interesting.

Heh - I wonder what hybridising nanotechnology and antimatter technology would result in? Or an antimatter fusion reaction, i.e. an antimatter sun? Forgive these fancies, as I mentioned before, I'm totally out of my tree here.

My mother was an English teacher, and all of my siblings and myself have a heavy mathematical/scientific/linguistic background, so translating something like non-anti-etc is a simple matter of maths. Not always accurate, but almost guaranteed to have hilarious results when inaccurate. Almost.

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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #21 on: September 06, 2006, 08:57:59 am »

It's made up of anti-quarks. Rather than just ordinary non-anti-quarks.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2006, 07:34:08 am by Lukipela » Logged

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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #22 on: September 06, 2006, 10:31:31 am »

Finally I get Terry Pratchett's joke about the five flavours of magic particles, based on the quark flavours!
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #23 on: September 11, 2006, 01:58:41 pm »

Time to flex my science muscles...Heres what I have a problem with...Remember when people didn't know about the ionisation of gas to produce light and thus had no handle on lightning? They invented gods to explain it, lacking the laws to explain it scientifically. Dark matter is something of the same. The article is saying that they've discovered gravity with no source, which MUST mean dark matter, this substance they invented because they lack the laws to fully explain the gravity of the universe.

Gravity, according to string theory (which I've started to warm up to recently) is the only one of the 4 fundamental forces which is not 'tied' to this membrane (basically M theory states that the universe is contained on a membrane in a higher dimensional order and we are stuck to the brane like paint to paper and cannot escape). THerefore, this explains the dramatic weakness of gravity compared to the electromagnetic forces, as most of the gravitons that are emitted by mass is escaping our branes and potentially showing up in other branes nearby. Therefore it is not hard to imagine that gravitons from a large graviton emitting location (black hole...?) on another brane is showing up as a gravitational anomaly on our brane, which is what has occured in this article.

I used to be a doubter but string theory is really starting to come together now.
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #24 on: September 11, 2006, 05:27:35 pm »

Umm... dark matter == Zeus. Wow.

Note, if you have these other 'branes', and gravity is leaking, then the contents of these other branes is... DARK MATTER.

Whoa, that was just too shocking, I've got to rest and dismantle my altar to the supersymmetric top quark.
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #25 on: September 13, 2006, 08:58:54 am »

dark matter as the 21st century equivalent of ancient deities, for the purpose of explaining odd phenomena? Hmmm.....

actually, this concept does make sense. Back then, we didn't even know that we didn't know. Now we know that there are huge gaps in our knowledge...

aaargh, now I have a headache...

string theory? how does that work?
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #26 on: September 13, 2006, 04:25:10 pm »

Let's consider a simple string theory, it has only 3 dimensions -- two spatial, and time. To large-scale observers in this system, they would only see one dimension. Why? Because one of the two spatial dimensions is 'compact'.

What does that mean? Take a garden hose. The outer surface of the hose are the spatial dimensions of this space. One way, there's a lot of room to work with. In the other, you go a short distance and you end up where you started.

Now, you can wrap rubber bands around the hose. Each rubber band is a particle. You can have them go around one time, or two times, or three times... etc. Each of these ways of wrapping changes the behavior of the band, so that it acts differently. So, different wrappings are what make the various fundamental particles different.

Of course, it's more complicated than that! Instead of one compact dimension, our theories call for around seven. There are all sorts of ways that you could wrap particles up in these dimensions, going around one, then another, looping around a third and then returning. The details of the topology (i.e. how the space is connected to itself) of these dimensions determine the rules of the universe.
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #27 on: October 11, 2006, 02:54:48 am »

string theory? how does that work?


Here's 3 hours of video explaining just that and more. Warning, some pretty heady stuff here, but it is presented in layman's terms so it's not too difficult to understand.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #28 on: October 22, 2006, 10:26:55 am »

I'm curious, what are your opinions on the theory of Modified newtonian dynamics and the proposed theory of Tensor-vector-scalar gravity?
I read an article about these theories and thought they seemed like neat solutions, but I don't know enough about physics to say if they can account for everything and/or are reasonable.
« Last Edit: October 22, 2006, 10:28:45 am by Halleck » Logged


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Re: Dark matter found
« Reply #29 on: October 22, 2006, 05:31:13 pm »

Tenser-vector-scalar gravity breaks several "rules" of conventional gravity.
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