SCIENTISTS HAVE "SPOTTED" THE FIRST GALAXY MADE (MOSTLY) OF DARK MATTER.
Cool!
The new galaxy is named VIRGOHI21, and it’s around 50 million light years away.
We have no idea how common these things are in the universe. They may be all around us, conspiring sinisterly against the sun-litten universe.
Excerpts:
Theorists have long said most of the universe is made of dark matter. Its presence is required to explain the extra gravitational force that is observed to hold regular galaxies together and that also binds large clusters of galaxies.
Theorists also believe knots of dark matter were integral to the formation of the first stars and galaxies. In the early universe, dark matter condensed like water droplets on a spider web, the thinking goes. Regular matter — mostly hydrogen gas — was gravitationally attracted to a dark matter knot, and when the density became great enough, a star would form, marking the birth of a galaxy.
The theory suggests that pockets of pure dark matter ought to remain sprinkled across the cosmos. In 2001, a team led by Neil Trentham of the University of Cambridge predicted the presence of entire dark galaxies.
Dark matter makes up about 23 percent of the universe’s mass-energy budget. Normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people, contributes just 4 percent. The rest of the universe is driven by an even more mysterious thing called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought to be the force pushing the universe apart faster and faster.
But some dispute the existence of dark energy.
ONE GUY IS HOPING NEW MEASUREMENTS OF THE MOON’S ORBIT WILL EXPLAIN IT AWAY.
I bet they know the answer to these questions on the dark planet Yuggoth.
"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth – great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad – yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.
"But remember – that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age.
Now, we got theories that gravity is just leaking:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dark_energy_050228.html