Comments on: AAS #13: A History of (galactic) Violence

By: Lugosi

Lugosi — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:25:06 +0000

Speaking of Hubble, NASA is on the verge of postponing the August mission to upgrade the telescope. The delays with the current shuttle mission are having a domino effect down the line, and apparently there are a couple of higher priority missions to the ISS that need to take place before the Hubble fix.

By: Eric TF Bat

Eric TF Bat — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:39:27 +0000

The Wikipedia article on dark matter is pretty dense (ha ha!) and suggests that the non-baryonic theory is the most popular: that is, dark matter isn’t composed of protons and neutrons, but of “something else”. So what happens if a large wodge of dark matter comes into contact with a large wodge of normal matter, say the planet Earth? Do they interact? Would we even notice? Or is it all too vague to tell yet?

All the stuff about quarks and baryons and so on strikes me as insanely complicated, and that makes me suspicious. Nature, in general, isn’t complicated: the general theme is infinite complexity arising from extreme simplicity. Chucking quarks into the mix makes it look like a cake recipe that begins “two cups of flour, three eggs, the entire cockroach and daffodil population of Portugal sorted alphabetically, one cup water…”. I have a feeling our descendants a hundred years from now will be looking back on all this the way we do on ether and phlogiston.

By: Jeffersonian

Jeffersonian — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:35:39 +0000

Andromeda you say? Maybe we should become proactive now and either make friends or welcome our new masters.

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:10:23 +0000

“500 times the mass of our entire galaxy.”

Is that 500 times the mass of the visible matter in our galaxy, or are you including the dark matter component of our galaxy in that figure?

By: PsyberDave

PsyberDave — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:31:30 +0000

Speaking of the universe being a dangerous place, this article is about a black hole that has the estimated mass of 18 BILLION suns (Holy Haleakala indeed!).

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13166-biggest-black-hole-in-the-cosmos-discovered.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

By: Barton Paul Levenson

Barton Paul Levenson — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:28:55 +0000

Gnat writes:

[[I have a question regarding Dark Matter: If it is a mass (with gravity) but there is no light, would it be possible for a (hypothetical) spaceship to “get stuck” or “slam into it”? ]]

It would be a problem if dark matter turns out to be baryonic matter, like the matter we’re used to. There’s some thought that it’s not, though. If it’s nonzero-mass neutrinos, they won’t be much of a problem.

By: Gnat

Gnat — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:33:43 +0000

I have a question regarding Dark Matter: If it is a mass (with gravity) but there is no light, would it be possible for a (hypothetical) spaceship to “get stuck” or “slam into it”?

I know, silly question, but Dark Matter is harder for me to get my head around than Black Holes!