Bill Tammeus
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- LIKE me, you no doubt spend a fair amount of your spare (ha!) time wondering where all the "dark matter" is in the universe.
Dark matter here does not refer to Enron accounting reports, projected federal budget deficits or Osama bin Laden's shriveled soul.
Rather, it is some kind of invisible matter created when the universe came into being.
Whatever it is, scientists are convinced that dark matter makes up a huge portion of the mass of the cosmos, even if no one has actually seen any of it.
Some scientists recently proposed the theory, yet to be tested, that most dark matter is in the form of sterile neutrinos. I'd say more about that, but when it's this close to Valentine's Day, I prefer to avoid all embarrassing talk of sterility.
But I cannot shirk my journalistic duty to keep you abreast of dark matter news. And there really has been some recently.
Astronomers from Rutgers University and the University of Edinburgh led an international team that found dark matter is distributed in almost exactly the same pattern as the galaxies we can see.
One reason I feel so confident in this conclusion is that one of the co-authors of a paper about all this is named Alan Heavens. He's the Edinburgh researcher. Beyond that, the name of the Rutgers co-author is Licia Verde. "Verde," as you know, means "green."
And we recently learned from other scientists that the entire universe is sort of a turquoise green.
So my theory is that if you've got people named Heavens and, in effect, Green telling you how the dark matter in the cosmos is distributed, you've got as close to a sure thing as you're likely to get in science these days.
Heavens, Verde and their colleagues used a large telescope in Australia to look at a chunk of the sky and, from those observations, to draw their dark-matter conclusions.
But, you ask, how can they find the dark matter if it's invisible and if telescopes can see only light or lighted matter?
You ask hard questions. If I weren't worried about bruising your ego, I'd tell you to go sit down and be quiet and to pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain. But you probably deserve an answer.
So I have scanned the universe looking for an explanation of how it's possible use a telescope to locate dark matter you can't see. And here is the best I've been able to do: "New analysis techniques have allowed astronomers to work out where the dark matter is."
I found this elucidation in a news release sent out by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, which provides science research grants in Britain.
I don't know exactly what "new analysis techniques" means, but I'm pretty sure you can have deep faith in them if they are approved by an astronomer named Heavens.
Besides, what are you going to do with the information if I really tell you exactly how it's possible to find invisible dark matter by looking through a telescope that can't see it? Probably just show off at parties, and surely we have enough of that going on.
As astronomers have been searching the skies looking for things that don't appear to be there, they also have turned up huge things that really are there - galaxies.
So far in this study - which goes by the unengaging name of the 2dF (two-degree field) Galaxy Redshift Survey - they have compiled a list of 210,000 galaxies.
I have no idea what they're all called, but I can guess. Ours is
the Milky Way. Others must be Snickers, Baby Ruth,
JWR contributor Bill Tammeus' latest book is "A Gift of Meaning." To order it, please click on title. To comment on his column, please click here.
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