The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104378   Message #2149107
Posted By: Amos
14-Sep-07 - 10:40 AM
Thread Name: BS: Random Traces From All Over
Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
Here's a headline I instantly related to for some reason:

Warm dark matter solves mystery of giant black holes
.19:12 13 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Stephen Battersby



The gas filament in the image above is shown at a later time in a simulation of warm dark matter. Warm dark matter forms dense filaments in which stars of different sizes form. Some would be small stars that burn slowly, so a few pure stars formed in these filaments could still be shining today (Illustration: Science)

In a simulation of cold dark matter, the filaments fragment into numerous, nearly spherical halos. One large star forms in the middle of each large halo. These large stars burn fast and die young, so that no pure hydrogen-helium stars survive today (Illustration: Science) Dark matter may be made of fast, lightweight particles – contrary to the most widely accepted theory, according to a new computer simulation. That could explain the peculiarly pure chemical makeup of some stars in the Milky Way, and the enormous mass of black holes that live at the hearts of large galaxies.

Because dark matter reveals itself only by its gravity, astronomers have few clues to its nature. The most popular model is cold dark matter: heavy subatomic particles that tend to move very slowly.
Another possibility is warm dark matter: lighter particles that move faster. The rapid motion of these particles smoothes out the small dense knots of matter that would otherwise form in the cores of galaxies, and there are hints that such dense knots are indeed missing.

Liang Gao and Tom Theuns of Durham University in the UK have built a computer simulation to compare the behaviour of cold and warm dark matter in the early universe. At first the two varieties behave alike, collapsing under gravity into a network of filaments that crisscross the universe.

But cold dark matter then coalesces into blobs, or haloes (see image bottom right), while warm dark matter does not (see image below right). The random motion of its particles smoothes out these blobs, so warm dark matter filaments just keep collapsing and getting denser until there is a narrow tube of matter typically 10,000 light years long with the mass of 10 million Suns....