Dark matter mapped?

I have no idea, just asked E.G. though, will let you know what he has to say.

He says,



That was it. That means he's busy now, but can ask him more tonight.

I had a feeling it might be something along those lines...

The article doesn't say what the dark matter IS exactly, and that's the big question.

It seems they have made progress in isolating it from normal matter, which may help them figure out what it is, but the big excitement will come when they can tell us what the dark matter is exactly.

Dunno. Being able to see how something behaves can go a long way toward telling you what it is (in fact, you might even say it is the definition of what something is). And it certainly doesn't look from the pictures like it behaves like regular matter does.

Dark matter is probably a collection of different things, some sub-atomic and some stellar and everything in between. Just as they have divided the Universe into Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Regular Matter, so they will probably have to divide Dark Matter into proportional groups.

Do you think the majority of dark matter in the Universe is sub-atomic particles, or burned out stars, or asteroid debris?

Dark Energy is more interesting to me. I think Dark Matter is going to turn out to be mostly particles and gas, lots of stray asteroids and several billion years worth of burned out suns. Let's face it, the visible matter isn't anything special, it's just that portion of the random junk which happened to condense into stars. It stands to reason it would only represent a small fraction of the debris out there.

But Dark Energy is different. It's going to tell us how the Universe works (IMO).

bookmarking

I'd been under the impression that some component of it was likely some form of matter we didn't know about yet -- but I don't keep up on this stuff at all.

Maybe a significant portion of dark matter is failed stars, by which I mean Jupiter-like object, things that just nearly didn't have enough mass to become stars. I mean, they would be difficult to spot if they were not close to a bright(ish) star, especially if they were scattered about in the vast inter-stellar space. Just my thoughts.

What gets me -- and I think it's mentioned in the article -- is that the interference patterns (that's what it looks like, anyway) created by the collision isn't replicated at all by visible objects, so far as I can tell.

From the original link...