Dark Matters

A quick pointer to the dark matter article that's on the BBC site at the moment as well as to the articles in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Nature and New Scientist. The story concerns the findings of the team lead by Professor Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge who, by making use of the very large telescope array, constructed 3D maps of distant "dwarf galaxies" and have inferred from their motions certain properties of dark matter. Some rather exciting things too, via the BBC:

"The distribution of dark matter bears no relationship to anything you will have read in the literature up to now," explained Professor Gilmore.

"It comes in a 'magic volume' which happens to correspond to an amount which is 30 million times the mass of the Sun.

"It looks like you cannot ever pack it smaller than about 300 parsecs - 1,000 light-years; this stuff will not let you. That tells you a speed actually - about 9km/s - at which the dark matter particles are moving because they are moving too fast to be compressed into a smaller scale.

"These are the first properties other than existence that we've been able determine."

The BBC article notes that the research findings have yet to be submitted to a journal so hold your horses...a little.

Updates: Courtesy of Andrew Jaffe who has a link to the preprint The internal kinematics of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and to some discussion at Dynamics of Cats.