New weight unit!
the echidna
A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated. While nothing like enough matter to solve physics’ “dark matter” problem, the work by CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun (chief scientist at the …
I think we need some new icons here - a brown pint for when a comment really deserves a beer to complement the yellow largery (fosters?) one when a comment is good enough for you to get one for yourself.
Or we could ask all foreign articles like this to be passed through Google Unit Converter before printing. Though a lot of countries don’t have real words for real pints poor sods.
See, the author was using Aussie Units of Measure, because the article really speaks to the fantastic science that is being done here in Australia (I'm writing this from Melbourne today). Now, IF the US was doing really cool things, then the units would be either robins to deer, or bibles to obese children. You know, things that are common in that country. However, as the majority of the US seems bent on thinking that the world is only 600,000 years old, and that evolution didn't really occur, and that you didn't _need_ a Superconducting Supercollider, and that most public schools should have their budgets slashed for teaching science (expensive subject compared to Home Economics or Gang Looting)...well then, I guess we should get used to more stories with weird, non-American units of comparison. Up next, El Reg will use the silkworm to panda ratio when they discuss just how badly China is out-researching the US...
And what about relative absorption of other, heavier free elements? While there are less of them around, they're heavier. Again, it may not solve the dark matter problem in the calcualtions, but it could provide another echidna or three'2 worth of those 30 echidnas in the Large Kangaroo-sized hole in the equations.
Dr Braun notes that “Although there’s more atomic hydrogen than we thought, it’s not big enough to solve the Dark Matter problem. If what we are missing had the weight of a large kangaroo, what we have found would have the weight of a small echidna.”
/Sign this is getting older than "I for one welcome or weigth of kangaroo overlords"
Is that the way it reduces the dark matter problem. Ok it only reduces it by 2-5% (or whatever the kangaroo/echidna mass ratio is) but is shows that there are still opportunities for visible matter explanations instead of dark matter - that are within an order of magnitude of the dark matter estimate itself.
Put it another way 19 more echidna sized breakthroughs and the need for dark matter goes away.
(and the need for dark matter goes away.)
About bloody time too, the sooner we get rid of this magical dark matter, that can't be detected what soever, the better.
Except to balance our accepted theory of the universe, nothing else in astronomy or sub atomic theory, supports it's existence. Either the missing mass is out there in good old fashioned mass somewhere, or our theory of the universe is wrong!
"nothing else in astronomy or sub atomic theory, supports it's existence."
No: Nothing in theory. Only our actual empirical evidence and observations.
Of course we could happily pretend to ignore visible evidence just to have a nice tidy theory as you suggest...
Dont forget empirical evidence also supported "bad humours" supporting the spread of disease. ie Bad Smell = cause not symptom of illness. Until the microscope was invented it was a perfectly good theory that matched established facts.
Im sure Dark Matter and Dark energy were only created as terms because some stuffy old physicists voted down "Stuff", "Magic" and the "Reversible Sedgewick particle"
There was empirical evidence for phlogiston too. There was also empirical evidence for another planet existing inside the orbit of Mercury to cause its orbit to behave non-Newtonianly. The former was explained by better experiments and a better understanding of the reaction of elements; the latter was explained by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
So the step from "we have observed this happening" to "some strange stuff must exist which has these properties" is bogus. Dark matter (and its even less explained counterpart, dark energy) may exist, but equally the fact that observations don't match theory may just need a different theory.
This post has been deleted by its author