What caused space to be?

[Big Trap]

Originally Posted by Gorilla

The composition of dark matter is still unknown so I'm not sure why you're saying its being overly complicated. Stars also produce a lot more than just heat we can detect most of the by-products of nuclear fission, the most easily detectable one being every wavelength on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation (not just visible light). We can also see various stages of stars collapsing (neutron stars for example). Any object we cant see but has a strong gravitational pull isn't necessarily dark matter. Singularities are another thing that exhibits that type of behavior. Dark matter is an assigned designation of the differences in mass and and gravitational interaction with visible matter. Its hardly simple though. Even with gravitational lensing we still hardly know anything about its nature.

How would a big star sized rock be detected from a far enough distance where only the brightest stars can seen by powerful microscopes other than seeing what is detectable gravitate towards it?

[Gorilla]

Originally Posted by Big Trap

How would a big star sized rock be detected from a far enough distance where only the brightest stars can seen by powerful microscopes other than seeing what is detectable gravitate towards it?

Radio telescopes maybe? Visible light isn't the only tool it seems astronomers use. There could very well be objects out there with electromagnetic phenomena that simply haven't reached us yet. I'm hardly an astrophysicist or astronomer though.

[Istlota]

Originally Posted by Gorilla

How did you reason that a vacuum is a substance? I think I missed something.

In the Science Daily article that Ukali posted a couple of days ago, a theoretical physicist from the European Council for Nuclear Research referred to a vacuum as the least understood of all substances.

What caused space to be?

[Istlota]

Originally Posted by Gorilla

Radio telescopes maybe? Visible light isn't the only tool it seems astronomers use. There could very well be objects out there with electromagnetic phenomena that simply haven't reached us yet. I'm hardly an astrophysicist or astronomer though.

Nevertheless, your answer is 100% acccurate. Celestial events emanate electromagnetic energy. Not only can a radio telescope "see" further than optical telescopes, but a Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes can be ganged together to "see" even further. In the movie, "Contact", Jodie Foster's character is supposed to have used the VLA in Sirocco, Mexico to "hear" alien contact.

Radio astronomy is further evidence that all perception of the material world, all that we think we see and hear, is not so much seen and heard as much as it is detected by our human electromagnetic antenna -- melanin. Without melanin, we would have eyes but could not see. Ears, but could not hear. I am speaking now of what is common knowledge among European scientists, but of which they do not dare discuss before laymen. Fortunately for us, black PhDs such as King, Moore, Brown, Bynum and Owens scour the latest papers on melanin research and then report back to us whazzup in their books:

"Why Darkness Matters", Edited by Edward Bruce Bynum
"African Consciousness", Edward Bruce Bynum
"African Origins of Biological Psychiatry", Richard King
"Melanin: A Key to Freedom", Richard King
"Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness", Carol Barnes
"Science of Melanin", T. Owens Moore

A most intriguing true fact. Between 1947 and 1950, a Dogon tribal elder described to a European missionary, Marcel Griaule, something which "illiterate" Africans were not supposed to know. The Dogon elder, Ogotemmeli, knew that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, was actually a binary twin star system. And, Ogotemmeli knew that, of the twin stars, Sirius B was a tiny white dwarf star. Ogotemmeli even knew that the period of the binary star system was 60 years [The Dogon are off by 10 years. We now know the period is 50 years. But, even so, damn.]

Now, you have to know, white folks did not know all this stuff about Sirius B until they invented radio telescopes. Sirius B is 10,000 times less luminous than it would have to be to be seen with the naked eye. So, how could an "illiterate" Dogon tribe know of it?

How, indeed.

White folks, predictably, invented all sorts of theories, totally without a shred of proof, of course. One Caucasian astronomer, Robert Temple, published a book entitled "The Sirius Mystery" where he seriously suggests that aliens traveled from Sirius to Earth and told the Dogon about their home. Other caucasians have tried to regain their scientific "superiority" by insisting, again without any shred of evidence, that some white guy (who, they can not say becauase this is all conjecture) must have told the Dogon tribe what they were not supposed to know.

In time, everyone will know the truth. The Dogon say that Sirius also has a third companion star as well. So far, few scientists are willing to accept that. Several astronomists, back in the the 1920s, did report seeing glimpses of a third star. But, so far, modern day scientists have not been able to duplicate those sightings so they ain't buying it.

[Ukali]

Originally Posted by Gorilla

Thanks for the article Ukali, I wish he was more specific on what he meant by vacuum but it was still informative.

If you're looking for specifics, you might enjoy deciphering the whiteboard notations from his presentation. He did a more accessible interview with NPR that might also interest you.

[Istlota]

The "God Particle"?

[Big Trap]

Originally Posted by Gorilla

The composition of dark matter is still unknown so I'm not sure why you're saying its being overly complicated. Stars also produce a lot more than just heat we can detect most of the by-products of nuclear fission, the most easily detectable one being every wavelength on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation (not just visible light). We can also see various stages of stars collapsing (neutron stars for example). Any object we cant see but has a strong gravitational pull isn't necessarily dark matter. Singularities are another thing that exhibits that type of behavior. Dark matter is an assigned designation of the differences in mass and and gravitational interaction with visible matter. Its hardly simple though. Even with gravitational lensing we still hardly know anything about its nature.

OK

Maybe I did try to over simplify ''dark matter''. But I still stand firm that it is a 'cool name'.