Shining some light on Dark Matter

[Lodestone]

Apparently the Subaru telescope up on Mauna Kea not only pinpointed a noisy radio source halfway (6 billion light years) across the universe, AND detected that pesky "dark matter" in appropriate quantities to verify the existing model. Nice!

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology...li=BBnbfcL

[TomK]

Thanks for that, Lodestone. The title of that article is a little misleading, as it sounds like dark matter has been identified (at least to me), which is not the case, instead the observations are consistent with where dark matter should be and how much there is, which is definitely a significant result.

The other thing that the observations suggest is these fast radio bursts (FRBs) are nothing to do with supernovae. It's very significant this one was seen in an elliptical galaxy. These are generally old galaxies with little gas and dust and hence star formation has pretty much finished - which means there should be few if no supernovae (which come form short-lived stars), so that really helps narrow down the possibilities that FRBs are caused by something a little more exotic - something the new field of gravitational wave observations might help us figure out!

[TomK]

Boy, talking about misleading titles...

http://goo.gl/sCeEFC

"The Mystery Of Fast Radio Bursts Is Solved"

No, it isn't, although the article itself was fine. BTW, for people with slow internet connections or browsers that have a hard time when all sorts of extras are loaded on a page, don't bother with the link. It almost killed my firefox browser (it's a Forbes web page).

ETA: works OK using chrome though.