Dark Matter and Brilliant Galaxies...

[j d worthington]

New information, and a new cosmic map....

Dark Matter's Link to Brilliant Galaxies Confirmed - Yahoo! News

The Story is from SPACE.com, by Ker Than, datelined Sun., Feb. 11, 2007, titled "Dark Matter's Link to Brilliant Galaxies Confirmed", and says, in part:

A new cosmic map confirms a close relationship between galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers and the distribution of the invisible dark matter in the early universe.

Quasars are incredibly bright objects located at the center of galaxies and thought to be powered by gas falling into enormous black holes up to a billion times the mass of the sun. Although smaller than our solar system, a single quasar can outshine an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars.

Compared to normal galaxies, quasars are extremely rare, about 200 million light years or more apart from one another on average. The new map was created using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) and includes more than 4,000 quasars, some as far as 11 billion light years away. The universe is estimated to be only about 14 billion years old.

The new map reveals a close relationship between quasars and dark matter, as predicted from theory.


'By measuring the clustering of quasars, we can learn about the dark matter halos in which they sit, and we find that they live in these very rare and very massive dark matter halos in the early universe,' said study team member Michael Strauss of Princeton University.


The new map will be detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal.

There's also a video, as well as images (and more information) at the story itself.

 

[Lenny]

The universe is estimated to be only about 14 billion years old.

Only 14 billion years? My! That is young! At least they've got a figure that is around the same age as their previous guess of, 13.5 billion years, wasn't it?

I'll read the full article when I've finished swimming through all the new posts. It sounds very interesting.

Makes you think, though - how do we know that all the astronomers and scientists aren't just making these things up? They're the only ones who know for sure.