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I just felt like saying something about dark matter.
Particles passing through, I guess they think that as the Earth rotates, a person is alternately upwind or downwind from it's flow. It is in motion apparently, but scarcly interacts with matter. The big question for me is could there ever be a machine build that could somehow generate a "Field?" that could interact with dark matter? Then perhaps a huge energy source, since the dark matter is in motion.
If they really are getting close to understanding the Higgs Boson, then perhaps some star treky type things might eventually occur.
I guess my point is that if dark matter is moving through use here, it is likely moving through Pluto as well. Maybe we will never tap it as an energy source, but I have a feeling that if there were a way, then it would certaintly help to open up a path to the stars.
But of course I have nothing to offer as how to do that.
We don't really have a understanding of Mass and Gravitation yet, at least not one I have been told and can understand.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Well, certainly I should think that if we could find a way of interacting with neutrinos (by manipulating the weak interaction?), we could create some kind of sail based on that, but it would have to be a mighty big sail at current fluxes, I suspect, and probably too heavy to be practical. Unless of course we could channel then into a tight beam between stars, but then you have to ask what advantage that gives you over conventional beam-riding, either particle or light based. Much higher velocity, perhaps, since neutrinos are travelling at nearly the speed of light? No risk of damaging the rest of the craft - you could step right into the path of the neutrinos and be unaffected?
There's an interesting paper in the last issue of JBIS (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society) concerning the use of focussed gravitational waves being uses to shorten the space between two objects - think warp drive but with the generation equipment outside the spacecraft. You could possibly lay warp lanes between stars with it, but they'd have to be lain subluminally. Or maybe not quite... The generation equipment had to be halfway between the objects, so you could possibly lay a trail of then using the previous one to boost the next to it's position.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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This topic of Void's, with participation by Terraformer, is the only topic in the archive with "darK" and "matter" in the title. While the topic is created with an interesting question, I am hoping it can adapt to introduction of a new report on dark matter research.
I note that no conclusions can be drawn from this research. Dark Matter and WIMP's appear to be about 50/50 matched in the debate.
Link to article goes here: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/ … ark-matter
Scientists think the mysterious glow in our galaxy could be from dark matter. What that means
By
5/23/18 CNN London Jacopo Prisco
Jacopo Prisco
Updated 21 hr agoThe Milky Way, seen here in the Uruguayan sky, has a mysterious glow at its center, which could be related to a hidden form of matter that physicists call dark matter.
The Milky Way, seen here in the Uruguayan sky, has a mysterious glow at its center, which could be related to a hidden form of matter that physicists call dark matter. Mariana Suarez/AFP/Getty Images
At the center of our galaxy, there’s a mysterious, diffuse glow given off by gamma rays — powerful radiation usually emitted by high-energy objects such as rapidly rotating or exploding stars.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the glow shortly after launching in 2008, and the light has puzzled scientists ever since, prompting speculation on its cause.
Some astronomers believe the source of the glow to be pulsars — the spinning leftovers of exploded stars — while others point to colliding particles of dark matter, an elusive and invisible form of matter that is believed to be five times more abundant than regular matter.
Many studies have previously found support for both ideas, but there seemed to be a problem with the dark matter theory: The gamma ray glow appeared to match the shape of the galactic bulge — a crowded, bulbous region at the center of the Milky Way that’s mostly made up of old stars, including pulsars. This observation seemed to support the pulsar theory, with experts theorizing that the glow would have taken a more spherical form if its source were dark matter. However, astronomers haven’t been able to observe enough of the pulsars that would be producing the gamma rays to make a conclusive assessment.
Now, new simulations made using supercomputers show for the first time that dark matter collisions could also have created the bulge-shaped glow, adding weight to the dark matter theory.
“We’re in the situation where we have two theories, one posturing dark matter and claiming that it could explain the data we see, another one old stars,” said Joseph Silk, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and coauthor of a study detailing the new findings, published Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“There’s a 50% chance that it might be dark matter at this point, as opposed to the slightly more mundane explanation of old stars, in my opinion.”
The gamma ray glow can be clearly seen in this image, from NASA's Fermi telescope data, along the map's center, which marks the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy.
The gamma ray glow can be clearly seen in this image, from NASA's Fermi telescope data, along the map's center, which marks the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy. NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
Evidence of dark matter would make for a groundbreaking discovery. Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky first theorized dark matter’s existence in the 1930s, and American astronomers Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford confirmed it in the 1970s. They noticed that stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies were moving too quickly to be held together by visible matter and gravity alone, and postulated that there was a large, unseen quantity of matter preventing them from flying apart. Despite decades of effort, scientists have never observed the mysterious substance directly, hence its name.
Vera Rubin discovered in the 1970's that most of the universe consists of 'dark matter.
Vera Rubin discovered in the 1970's that most of the universe consists of 'dark matter. The Washington Times/Shutterstock
“There’s no question that the nature of dark matter is one of the outstanding major problems in physics,” Silk said. “It’s something that’s everywhere — near us, far from us, and we just don’t know what it is.”Hunting for WIMPs
There are many hypotheses on what dark matter could be, including remnants of primordial black holes or an undiscovered type of particle. Much of the effort to find dark matter has centered on the latter idea, leading to the construction of detectors such as the LZ Dark Matter Experiment in South Dakota.
The instrument is designed to spot one of the leading dark matter candidates, hypothetical particles called WIMPs — Weakly Interacting Massive Particles — which don’t absorb light and can pass through regular matter almost seamlessly. Scientists believe that when two WIMPs meet, they annihilate each other and produce gamma rays, which would make them a plausible source of the glow.
Related article
This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang. Hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the "normal," or baryonic, matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separate from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.Scientists may have found an answer to the mystery of dark matter. It involves an unexpected byproduct
Silk’s study used supercomputers to create a map of where dark matter should be in the Milky Way, taking into account how the galaxy originally formed.
“The problem was that all of the models over the past 20 years of the dark matter in our galaxy assume it’s basically like a spherical ball. There is no shape to it, because that was the simplest model,” Silk said.
“Our contribution was, for the first time, to make a real computer simulation of the dark matter distribution. And lo and behold, we found the central part of the dark matter, where the gamma rays would be being emitted, to be, in fact, squashed — more like egg-shaped.” This squashed shape is a close match to the Fermi telescope data, Silk explained.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, shown here, scans the entire sky every three hours as it orbits Earth.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, shown here, scans the entire sky every three hours as it orbits Earth. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR)
Luckily, confirmation of the link between dark matter and the glow may not be too far in the offing. A new instrument, the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, or CTAO, is under construction at two sites — one in Chile and another in Spain — and will start to return data as soon as 2027. CTAO will detect gamma rays at a much higher resolution than Fermi, Silk said, making it possible to tell if the gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way are the product of dark matter collisions.
That finding would be a breakthrough in the search for the elusive substance, he added, as well as offer proof that at least some dark matter is made of WIMPs. If, on the contrary, CTAO doesn’t link the glow to dark matter, scientists would be back to square one in the search, with all options still on the table.
A fundamental secret
The study helps reopen the possibility that dark matter could explain the glow at our galactic center, although it doesn’t give new positive evidence in favor of dark matter, said Tracy Slatyer, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved with the study. However, she is not convinced that there is a definitive match between the shape of the dark matter distribution and the stellar bulge. “I thought the dark matter hypothesis was still reasonable even before this study,” she added.
This work is further support for the international effort to keep pushing in the hunt for WIMPs, according to Chamkaur Ghag, a professor of physics and astronomy at University College London, who also didn’t participate in Silk’s research. “They remain a most elegant solution to the long-standing dark matter problem,” Ghag added via email, noting that with even more detectors for WIMPs under development, seeing signals of these particles annihilating in space would mean settling the near-century old puzzle of dark matter.
The central detector of the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, seen here before it was placed underground.
The central detector of the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, seen here before it was placed underground. Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Nico Cappelluti, an associate professor in the department of physics at the University of Miami, said that the Fermi telescope has been a game changer for NASA, and this paper shows that dark matter is still very much in the race to explain the strange glow at the center of our galaxy. “That mystery is alive, and it’s the kind that keeps scientists like me awake at night,” said Cappelluti, who didn’t take part in the study.Figuring out what dark matter is has been the scientific quest of our century, he added, noting that “WIMPs, these hypothetical particles, have been our prime suspects for years.” The fact that experiments on Earth haven’t caught them yet is frustrating, he said.
“But Fermi gives us a reason to keep believing. This paper reminds us not to cross WIMPs off the list just yet — they might still be lighting up the center of our galaxy,” Cappelluti said. “And if that’s true, we’re closer than ever to uncovering a fundamental secret of the universe.”
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Void's original question in creating this topic was interesting because it reminded me of the Aether theory that was popular before the famous Michaelson-Morley experiment at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Their work fed into the work of Albert Einstein.
Now, in an age when the concept of "dark matter" is taken seriously, we have a report of research that appears to show dark matter tearing entire galaxies apart, not with "wind" but with gravity. The report at the link below explains recent research. What is distinctive is that a stream of stars are observed in a galaxy outside our local group.
Link here >> https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/13/science/ … ark-matter
Science
A cosmic breadcrumb trail leads astronomers to a discovery in another galaxy
By
Taylor Nicioli
Aug 13, 2026This Hubble Space Telescope image highlights a faint trail of stars known as a globular cluster stellar stream. Hubble Space Telescope
A faint ribbon of stars in a distant galaxy has led astronomers to a discovery that could reveal secrets about one of our universe’s greatest mysteries.
Hidden within the Hubble Space Telescope’s archival data, researchers found the barely visible trail of stars — the first globular cluster stellar stream detected outside the Milky Way. The celestial phenomenon, located in a galaxy roughly 115 million light-years from Earth, is the remnant of a dense ball of stars being slowly pulled apart by the gravity of its host galaxy. As the cluster loses stars, the remnants form a long, narrow stream.
Astronomers have found dozens of stellar streams within the Milky Way, but because these trails are faint and hard to detect, many more are likely left to be discovered. Now, with evidence that they occur in other galaxies, astronomers may be able to use them as cosmic tracers to understand better how galaxies form and evolve.
Related article
This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 14 million light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission, which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. The few objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies. Before the Hubble observations, scientists could argue that Cloud-9 is a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen with ground-based telescopes due to the lack of sensitivity. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys shows that, in reality, the failed galaxy contains no stars.
This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 14 million light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission, which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. The few objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies. Before the Hubble observations, scientists could argue that Cloud-9 is a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen with ground-based telescopes due to the lack of sensitivity. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys shows that, in reality, the failed galaxy contains no stars.
NASA/ESA/VLA/Gagandeep Anand/Alejandro Benitez-Llambay/Joseph DePasquale
‘Cloud-9’ is a newly discovered celestial object. It could help solve a cosmic mystery6 min read
The finding, which was detailed in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, also allowed the team of astronomers to map the galaxy — known as UGC 9050-Dw1 — and its gravitational field by modeling the stream.*** continuing original article:
Because the galaxy’s gravity influences the stellar stream’s shape and motion, the researchers used the trail of stars to trace the galaxy’s gravitational field. Through their modeling, they were also able to estimate the galaxy’s total mass, how much of it is made up of visible objects, such as stars, and how much is composed of dark matter — a mysterious form of matter that cannot be seen but has gravity.When the study team started to realize that it had found a stellar stream beyond our galaxy, “it was very exciting,” said co-lead author Julie Kiel Holm, a doctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen who studies globular clusters and the formation of stellar streams. “And then we sort of looked at each other and asked, ‘Where do we go from here?’“
Related article
This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang. Hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the "normal," or baryonic, matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separate from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.
This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang. Hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the "normal," or baryonic, matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separate from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.
NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.
Scientists may have found an answer to the mystery of dark matter. It involves an unexpected byproduct*** Continuing original article:
Dark matter intrigues scientists because they don’t know what it is, yet they can see its gravitational influence on stars and galaxies. “About 80% to 85% of our universe, we think is dark matter, so that makes it very, very enticing to try and figure out what it is,” Kiel Holm added.Stellar streams have been used to help scientists map the dark matter within our own galaxy. Now, those same tools can be used to help better understand the dark matter composition and structure of other galaxies that share the universe.
Spotting stellar streams
The newly discovered stream is located within an ultra-diffuse galaxy — one that is spread out and extremely faint, which likely made the
stellar stream easier to spot, the study authors speculated.“At the same time, these ultra-diffuse galaxies are thought to be very massive, and you need to be massive in order to actually pull out stars from that parent cluster,” said co-lead author Sarah Pearson, an associate professor at DTU Space, the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark.
“So those two things together — the fact that it provides a faint background, but also has a strong enough tidal field to pull out stars from the cluster — is a great combination if you would want to find one of these,” she added.
Related article
The low-surface-brightness galaxy CDG-2, shown in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is dominated by dark matter and contains only a sparse scattering of stars. This galaxy is nearly invisible, but by using advanced statistical techniques, scientists identified it by searching for tight groupings of stars called globular clusters at the centre of this image. The Hubble observations include those from programme 15235 (W. Harris). [Image description: A field of space with a dozen white foreground stars and a number of small, yellow background galaxies.]
The low-surface-brightness galaxy CDG-2, shown in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is dominated by dark matter and contains only a sparse scattering of stars. This galaxy is nearly invisible, but by using advanced statistical techniques, scientists identified it by searching for tight groupings of stars called globular clusters at the centre of this image. The Hubble observations include those from programme 15235 (W. Harris). [Image description: A field of space with a dozen white foreground stars and a number of small, yellow background galaxies.]
Li (utoronto), Ima/ESA/NASA
NASA’s Hubble telescope detects possible ‘dark galaxy’Resuming original article:
When trying to identify these streams, astronomers look for thin, elongated structures on their telescopes. The streams can also be tracked through their movement along the sky; however, doing so requires a telescope to be in the same position over time, and the technique has so far only been able to find stellar streams in the Milky Way.“The area that the Hubble can see is actually not that big. So you have to be very, very lucky to be able to see this, and we don’t really know where to look to basically target them,” said study coauthor Tjitske Starkenburg, a research assistant professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
The study authors predict that future telescope advancements will allow for further detection of these clusters within and outside our galaxy. Starkenburg pointed to NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that is expected to launch at the end of the month and will have a larger field of view, “like 100 Hubbles in one image.”
Detecting a faint stellar stream in a galaxy outside the Local Group — our galactic neighborhood that consists of more than 50 galaxies that are gravitationally bound together — is remarkable, David Martínez-Delgado, an astrophysicist and researcher for the nonprofit foundation ARAID at the Center for Studies of the Cosmos Physics of Aragón in Teruel, Spain, said in an email. Martínez-Delgado was not involved with the new study.
“I had previously thought that detecting globular cluster tidal tails in external galaxies would be extremely challenging, given their small angular size and extremely low surface brightness,” he added. “This result demonstrates that, with sufficiently deep and high-resolution observations, such structures may be detectable well beyond the Local Group.”
Related article
A visualisation of the Milky Way galaxy, with the stars that Khyati Malhan and Hans-Walter Rix identified in the Gaia DR3 data set as belonging to Shiva and Shakti shown as colored dots. Shiva stars are shown in green and Shakti stars in pink. The complete absence of green and pink markers in some regions does not mean that there are no stars from Shiva or Shakti there, as the data set used for this study only covers specific regions within our galaxy.
A visualisation of the Milky Way galaxy, with the stars that Khyati Malhan and Hans-Walter Rix identified in the Gaia DR3 data set as belonging to Shiva and Shakti shown as colored dots. Shiva stars are shown in green and Shakti stars in pink. The complete absence of green and pink markers in some regions does not mean that there are no stars from Shiva or Shakti there, as the data set used for this study only covers specific regions within our galaxy.
S. Payne-Wardenaar/K. Malhan/MPIA
Earliest building blocks of the Milky Way discovered near its galactic heartResuming original article:
A record of galactic evolutionStellar streams can act as records of a galaxy’s past, giving astronomers clues about how galaxies change over time. When a larger galaxy pulls apart a smaller dwarf galaxy, the dwarf’s stars can stretch into a stream — a cosmic breadcrumb trail of that encounter.
Streams from globular clusters, such as the one described in the study, preserve that history on a smaller scale, revealing how the cluster has traveled through its host galaxy and how the galaxy’s gravity has gradually pulled it apart. By tracing that history, researchers can then learn how the galaxy’s mass is distributed, including the unseen dark matter that shapes its gravitational field.
Observing the first globular cluster stellar stream outside the Milky Way opens the door to detecting more of these phenomena in galaxies across the universe. The study authors said they hope that future detections will help reveal more secrets about other galaxies as well as the dark matter within them.
One feature worth further research, the authors noted, are the gaps or clumps in stellar streams that scientists theorize develop when small concentrations of dark matter pass through them. “But there are other things that could cause some of those similar effects,” Starkenburg said.
Finding more streams, perhaps in other galaxies, and observing whether they have similar gaps or clumps, “that’s a much stronger argument for that it has to be dark matter,” Starkenburg added.
Many questions remain about dark matter despite its existence being known for almost a century, Pearson noted.
“It really is just one of the biggest open questions in physics,” she said. “What is the nature of dark matter? Is it a particle? Is it many? Is it something completely different? We don’t know.”
Taylor Nicioli is a freelance journalist based in New Yo
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