BBC Focus Magazine

[M Paul Lloyd]

And as the Higgs Boson grabs the limelight this little bit of news is perhaps of equal importance ?

Dark matter filament found, scientists say
By Amina Khan / Los Angeles Times
Thursday, July 5, 2012
The mysterious stuff called dark matter is thought to act as the spider silk for the cosmic web of the universe. But although it makes up most of the matter in the universe, scientists have been able to find only clumps of it in the web’s galaxy-filled "nodes," not along the gossamer threads that are thought to help give the universe its structure.
Now, after much searching and with a little luck, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered a dark matter filament connecting two clusters of galaxies about 2.7 billion light-years away.
The discovery, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, catapults these filaments from sound theory to observable fact.

More here
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/nation ... ion=recent

[MikeG]

We've all heard of dark matter, but what is it exactly? Is it just like normal materr, other than that it doesn't reflect light? Would a spaceship be destroyed if it flew into a clump of dark matter? That is, is it solid and compact? And finally, can we somehow take advantage of these "fillaments"?

[M Paul Lloyd]

but what is it exactly?

That MikeG is a very good question and thus far words like 'exotic matter get used quite a lot but it's really just a front for them not knowing.

I, in my humble, non expert opinion, hold that it may be a form of carbon left over from stellar formation (a sort of intergallactic soot as it were) and is abundant throughout the universe, and in especially significant quantities between galaxies.

But then again I'm no experet.

However its effect on any spacecraft would, I'm pretty sure, be minimal as its distribution would be such that its density would be minimal and almost certainly energy nuetral, with a phyiscal temperature at the same level as the universal background.

[Shadowwolf]

Would a spaceship be destroyed if it flew into a clump of dark matter? That is, is it solid and compact?

Well running into filaments and suchlike never worked out well for the Enterprise