This was empowering. Thank you.

100s of pleasure dots

Wow

Alaska Airlines flight map. Not sure what year.

Link?

Does the Wheadon sex pest stuff ruin Buffy?

I haven’t seen it but was a Firefly fan, and some of the things in that show now make me cringe.

I’ve read all of these and they were super important to my teenage self.

But what about Jerry Cornelius? Without that you aren’t really trying at all.

Are we supposed to trust Oracle?

“tired light”?

deleted by creator

I use Arc, and really love it. But plan to avoid the AI dreck

Fell on a throw rug yesterday

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter

This image shows the new filament, which connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. These clusters are visible as bright spots at the bottom and top of the filament (four white dots encircled by color). A mottled band of purple stretches between these bright dots, standing out brightly against the black surrounding sky; this is the filament of X-ray-emitting hot gas that had not been seen before, and contains a chunk of ‘missing’ matter. The purple band comprises data from Suzaku. The astronomers were able to identify and remove any possible ‘contaminating’ sources of X-rays from the filament using XMM-Newton, leaving behind a pure thread of ‘missing’ matter. These sources can be seen here as bright dots studded through—and removed from—the filament’s emission. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton and ISAS/JAXA

Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery.

The astronomers used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and JAXA’s Suzaku X-ray space telescopes to make the discovery.

The work has been published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Over one-third of the ‘normal’ matter in the local universe—the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life—is missing. It hasn’t yet been seen, but it’s needed to make our models of the cosmos work properly.

Said models suggest that this elusive matter might exist in long strings of gas, or filaments, bridging the densest pockets of space. While we’ve spotted filaments before, it’s tricky to make out their properties; they’re typically faint, making it difficult to isolate their light from that of any galaxies, black holes, and other objects lying nearby.

New research is now one of the first to do just this, finding and accurately characterizing a single filament of hot gas stretching between four clusters of galaxies in the nearby universe.

“For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos—something that’s not happened before,” says lead researcher Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “It seems that the simulations were right all along.”

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter A simulation of the ‘cosmic web’, the vast network of threads and filaments that extends throughout the universe. Stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters spring to life in the densest knots of this web, and remain connected by vast threads that stretch out for many millions of light-years. These threads are invisible to the eye, but can be uncovered by telescopes such as ESA’s XMM-Newto. Credit: Illustris Collaboration / Illustris Simulation

XMM-Newton on the case Clocking in at over 10 million degrees, the filament contains around 10 times the mass of the Milky Way and connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. All are part of the Shapley Supercluster, a collection of more than 8,000 galaxies that forms one of the most massive structures in the nearby universe.

The filament stretches diagonally away from us through the supercluster for 23 million light-years, the equivalent of traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times.

Konstantinos and colleagues characterized the filament by combining X-ray observations from XMM-Newton and Suzaku, and digging into optical data from several others.

The two X-ray telescopes were ideal partners. Suzaku mapped the filament’s faint X-ray light over a wide region of space, while XMM-Newton pinpointed very precisely contaminating sources of X-rays—namely, supermassive black holes—lying within the filament.

“Thanks to XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing else,” adds co-author Florian Pacaud of the University of Bonn, Germany. “Our approach was really successful, and reveals that the filament is exactly as we’d expect from our best large-scale simulations of the universe.”

“The models were right”: Astronomers find ‘missing’ matter This image shows the new filament, which connects four galaxy clusters: two on one end, two on the other. These clusters are visible as bright spots at the bottom and top of the filament (four white dots encircled by color). A mottled band of purple stretches between these bright dots, standing out brightly against the black surrounding sky; this is the filament of X-ray-emitting hot gas that had not been seen before, and contains a chunk of ‘missing’ matter. The purple band comprises data from Suzaku. The astronomers were able to identify and remove any possible ‘contaminating’ sources of X-rays from the filament using XMM-Newton, leaving behind a pure thread of ‘missing’ matter. These sources can be seen here as bright dots studded through—and removed from—the filament’s emission. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton and ISAS/JAXA

Not truly missing As well as revealing a huge and previously unseen thread of matter running through the nearby cosmos, the finding shows how some of the densest and most extreme structures in the universe—galaxy clusters—are connected over colossal distances.

It also sheds light on the very nature of the ‘cosmic web’, the vast, invisible cobweb of filaments that underpins the structure of everything we see around us.

“This research is a great example of collaboration between telescopes, and creates a new benchmark for how to spot the light coming from the faint filaments of the cosmic web,” adds Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist.

“More fundamentally, it reinforces our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations: it seems that the ‘missing’ matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the universe.”

Piecing together an accurate picture of the cosmic web is the domain of ESA’s Euclid mission. Launched in 2023, Euclid is exploring this web’s structure and history.

The mission is also digging deep into the nature of dark matter and energy—neither of which have ever been observed, despite accounting for a whopping 95% of the universe—and working with other dark universe detectives to solve some of the biggest and longest-standing cosmic mysteries

But, getting closer every day!

Oh, I thought he was talking about US

$659, yikes

Is Arc considered obscure?

Some of us just want to be naked around our neighbors!

Is that OK with you, Larry? I don’t judge you for your little preferences, do I Larry?

Now go heat up the bath.

I’m still on Google’s Keep. Please tell me why I should switch.

Current Seattle City council