Monday, February 06, 2006

Dark Energy and Dark Matter















So they reckon that they now have direct metrics on to the mathematics and physics of the missing mass of the universe via 10,000K temp and 9km/s speed of Dark Matter.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4679220.stm

When I was back at University Of London in the late eighties we were looking at this missing mass problem INDIRECTLY using principle of moments when we were measuring the dynamics of globular clusters. Our standard textbook then was Galactic Dynamics by Binney and Tremaine.

At that stage there was debate whether the dark matter solution was either Hot Dark Matter consisting of (near)zero mass relativistic moving non baryonic particles or Cold Dark Matter consisting of large mass slow moving non baryonic particles.


Don't confuse this dark matter discovery of the 1970s with the discovery of dark energy in the 1990s which is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.