Thursday, May 10, 2007

New Dark Matter Discovery?

Seems strange that Nasa would announce a press conference five days early but this might be interesting. Dark matter in a ring...not condensed into a sphere? Is it really the dark matter or is it just a small contribution (such a bunch of MACHO brown dwarfs which don't add up to the expected twenty something percent of the universe's dark matter?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is a teaser
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AAS...209.3703J

I'm a little bit skeptical, would like to see the mass reconstruction to see that there are no systematics in patching the weak and strong lensing data.

The sims sounds a little bit weak, at least as of the AAS meeting. You can get ring ripples during near head on collisions, but it is hard to get significant mass in them.

Anonymous said...

NASA is all hot and bothered for TOP SECRET/Lotus Eater black project funding,

http://www.dansdata.com/zeroblaster.htm
http://www.dansdata.com/airzooka.htm
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/vortgen.html
http://home.comcast.net/~t129wojce647/vger/index.html

Kea said...

Hi. Thanks for posting about this. Some of us are surprised by the apparent lack of interest in this observation. The astro-ph paper goes into some details about the parameter independent weak + strong lensing method for calculating mass distribution. Of course, and unfortunately, they use LCDM, but this shouldn't affect the basic result of a large Ring in the mass distribution.