Secrets of Dark Matter

No wonder there is a rennaissance of anti-Darwin /
Intelligent Design with this sort of stuff coming from
a scientist. Belief in a big-G of the god/allah variety
seems more rational than this sort of thing.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...703204,00.html
Research into dwarf galaxies starts to unlock the deep secrets of dark
matter

· Mysterious substance described for first time
· 1,000-light-year-wide bricks make up universe

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Monday February 6, 2006
The Guardian

....
Cambridge University researchers have creaked open the door to one of the
greatest mysteries in science. For the first time they can describe some
physical properties of "dark matter", the mysterious substance that
outweighs all the stars and galaxies that can be seen in the universe.
Cosmologists know that the stars and planets we can see add up to only 4% of
the mass required to keep the universe in its ordered state. The rest is
made of a combination of unknown particles called dark matter and a source
of energy, which seems to push galaxies apart, called dark energy. Other
than knowing that both these things must exist, scientists have been at a
loss to describe anything about them.

But by studying the motion of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, Gerry
Gilmore, the deputy director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge
University, calculated that dark matter moved at 5.6 miles a second and that
the smallest chunks it could exist in measured 1,000 light years across and
had 30m times the mass of the Sun.

"This is the first time we've determined a property of the dark matter
robustly in a way that we expect will give us some real clues as to what the
real physics of this stuff is," said Professor Gilmore at a briefing in
London. He said the universe appeared to be built out of these invisible
1,000 light-year-wide bricks of dark matter.

"There must be some basic property of the dark matter that limits it in that
way," he said. "It's the basic unit from which bigger things are made up.
Some of these you put stars in and you call it a little galaxy; sometimes
you put several of these together and call it a bigger galaxy. But you never
get anything smaller."

The biggest surprise is that dark matter is not the cold cosmic sludge that
scientists once thought. Prof Gilmore calculated its temperature to be in
the tens of thousands of degrees, although this is not normal heat. "Normal
hot things glow and you can feel the infrared coming off," he said. "The
strange thing about dark matter is that it doesn't give off radiation." This
is because dark matter is not made of electrons and protons, the fundamental
particles that everything else consists of ....