Cosmic Collision Reveals Dark Matter

Posted on Aug 21, 2006

And it’s quite striking (pictured to the right), wouldn’t you agree? The explosioncollision that created it is, like, apparently the biggest thing to hit the galaxy since the Big Bang. So we’re posting it.

Politically flavored righteous indignation will return to this space soon.

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Space.com:

New observations of a great big cosmic collision provide the best evidence yet that invisible and mysterious dark matter really does exist.

The collision, between two huge clusters of galaxies, is the “most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, that we know about,” said Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

The impact split normal matter and dark matter apart, rendering the dark matter’s gravitational presence observable.

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