Massive "Dark Halo" Discovered Beyond Edge of the Milky Way

[Ichingcarpenter]

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0120a6eb04c5970b-800wi

The biggest things in the universe just got bigger - or rather, they've always been bigger and we somehow missed it up to now. Supercomputer simulations of galactic core black holes indicate that instead of being a mere two billion times the mass of the sun, so insignificant you'd surely lose them if you sneezed, some could be as large as six billion suns -not including the "dark halo" that surrounds the Milky Way, which is more than ten times as much mass as all of the visible stars, gas, and dust in the rest of the galaxy.

The study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Studies (which couldn't sound smarter if it was Lex Luthor's university degree) focused on Messier 87, a particularly bright active galaxy in the Virgo cluster whose size, strong signals and proximity to Earth make it a common astronomical experimentation subject. Dr Karl Gebhart and colleagues ran a supercomputer simulation to calculate the mass of the monster at M87's core.


Snip.......

The dark matter halo is the single largest part of the Milky Way, covering the space between 100,000 light-years to 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. It is now believed that about 95% of the Galaxy is composed of dark matter, which does not seem to interact with the rest of the Galaxy's matter and energy in any way except through gravity. The dark matter halo is more than ten times as much mass as all of the visible stars, gas, and dust in the rest of the galaxy. While the luminous matter we see in the night skymakes up approximately 90,000,000,000 solar masses, he dark matter halo is believed to include around 600,000,000,000 to 3,000,000,000,000 solar masses of dark matter.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/massive-dark-halo-of-the-milky-way-discovered.html


Anyone remember the old star trek episode.... "Where no man has gone before' and the barrier they found out the edge of the galaxy?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. "My God! It's full of dust!"

[bananas]

2. We are nothing more than cosmic dust bunnies.

It's all fun and games until the dust-buster sweeps by.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. the gravity of the situation escapes me.

There is so little that we actually know about the galaxy at large. Heck, we haven't even tried to visit our second nearest star.

[niyad]

4. thank you so much for sharing this

[jayfish]

5. I Watched That Episode Recently And Got Kick Out Of It.

They ended up a billion light years from Earth and found themselves at the edge of the Universe. Just 22 years after the episodes original air date and 355 years before the date the story takes place we know that the edge of the observable universe is almost 50 billion light years away. Shows just how quickly our level of knowledge can advance. ...sometimes faster than our wildest dreams.

Jay

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Cosmology gets weirder and more mind-blowing every week

:wow:

[silverweb]

7. Isn't that the truth!

And I love it in all its jaw-dropping, mind-boggling weirdness.

Sometimes I wish I had the brains to understand it better, but mostly I just enjoy being blown away by it all. :)