Suddenly, a Wild Vern.

Finding Darkness In The Light: How Vera Rubin Changed The Universe

“Instead, the speeds rose rapidly, but then leveled off. As you moved farther away from a galaxy’s core, the stars’ rotation speeds didn’t drop, but rather leveled off to a constant value. The rotation curves, unexpectedly, were flat. Rubin’s work began in the Andromeda galaxy, our closest large, galactic neighbor, but quickly was extended to dozens of galaxies, which all showed the same effects. Today, that number is in the thousands, and our multiwavelength, advanced surveys have shown that it can’t be missing atoms, ions, plasmas, gas, dust, planets or asteroids that account for the mass. Either something is screwy with the laws of gravity on galactic (and larger) scales, or there’s some type of unseen mass in the Universe.”

When you look at a galaxy in the night sky, it’s easy to imagine that it’s just a system of masses like our Solar System, except on a larger scale. Instead of a single, central mass, you have many stars responsible for the galaxy’s gravitational pull. The stars revolving around the galactic center feel the tug from all the other stars and orbit accordingly, with the inner stars orbiting quickly and the outermost ones – the ones most distant from the gravitational sources – orbiting more slowly, just like the planets. At least, that’s what you’d expect. But when the techniques and the technologies for measuring this finally came to fruition, the result was a colossal surprise: the stars in a galaxy didn’t determine the galaxy’s mass or rotation properties. In fact, if you went out and measured the gas, dust, plasma, planets and everything else we can observe in the galaxy, they don’t explain it either. Something unseen and invisible was influencing the way galaxies behave.

The Most Important X-Ray Image Ever Taken Proved The Existence Of Dark Matter

“Yet the most important X-ray image of all time was an incredible surprise. This is the Bullet Cluster: a system of two galaxy clusters colliding at high speeds. As the gaseous matter inside collides, it slows, heats up, and lags behind, emitting X-rays. However, we can use gravitational lensing to learn where the mass is located in this system. he bending and shearing of light from background galaxies shows it’s separated from the matter’s and X-rays’ location. This separation is some of our strongest evidence for dark matter.”

There are many different lines of evidence for dark matter, but one of the biggest contentions of those who disbelieve it is that a direct empirical proof of its existence is needed. If it exists in a large, diffuse halo around every galaxy, cluster, and component of large-scale structure in the Universe, you should be able to prove it. Starting more than 10 years ago, astronomers have been able to do just that. When galaxy clusters collide, the overwhelming majority of normal matter, residing in the intracluster medium, should smash together, heat up, and emit X-rays. It does! But the biggest deal is that the gravitational mass, reconstructed through lensing, doesn’t coincide with the normal matter.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The composite image, which combines a number of individual images, confirms predictions that galaxies across the universe are tied together through a cosmic web connected by dark matter that has until now remained unobservable.

Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

Triangulum Galaxy (M33)

Dark Matter Ring in a Galaxy Cluster.

get out of bed because there’s something you’re excited about.

don’t think about people who left.

clean the clutter in the room and dishes in your sink.

smile at yourself and random people.

do something kind and out of the blue to make someone happy.

work out or meet with friends even though you have no energy to.

calm yourself down when your thoughts race.

remember to drink water.

don’t dwell on things you can’t control.

do things good for yourself, even though you have no motivation.

and i think that part of it is because tumblr managed to really remain as close to outside of “real life” as possible. your parents aren’t on here. the people you see in real life aren’t on here. it was truly a space that was able to exist for you.

the people you followed and who followed you did so not because they felt some personal obligation (in the way facebook and twitter can feel), but because they liked what was being posted. they liked you being you, or at least being your tumblr persona.

and, perhaps more importantly, we all existed as a username. what appears next to your posts was nothing more than an avatar and that. real names were not only not required, but also discouraged, because you wouldn’t see them.

tumblr was (and is, at least for now) very much a part of the Old Internet, the internet of the early 2000s, where you had a space to be weird and experiment and play around however you want. the internet that was really exemplified by geocities, a free-for-all smorgasbord of things that each publisher found interesting and felt like sharing.

i think it’s fair to compare the change of the internet to gentrification. we very much started with this wild west, no-mans-land that was inhabited by outcasts and artists who went by pseudonyms. as time went on that became less and less the case. now almost every site has a real name policy, and literally everyone is on the internet. 

tumblr managed to stay weird until recently. tumblr managed to keep the oddballs hidden, to let people inhabit whatever persona they wanted, and to create and discard them as they pleased. and that’s something very special. something that “normal” society doesn’t have.

if you go on twitter, you’re expected to go as yourself, and while you can create numerous profiles, changing between them is difficult, and twitter will do its damndest to make sure you find people you know in real life. same with instagram. facebook is even more “real life”. and there’s a consequence to that. all the baggage that exists in real life exists with those sites.

on twitter the most popular posts are by celebrities, by names you’ve heard of in passing. on tumblr the most popular post is literally some shitpost by a random user.

facebook, and all the other “real name” people, talk about how that keeps people authentic, how it makes people act better, how it’s a “meritocracy”. they all exist in an ignorant privileged white boy bubble. without a real identity attached to an idea you don’t know what the person behind it looks like, you don’t know the life they live, and because of that your unconscious biases can’t come in to play (okay yes they can because we have biases around word usage, but less so than around skin color). the real “meritocracy” is the one where everyone is at a level playing field. and that was, to an extent, the old web (ignoring access to resources and limited internet access for a second if you will).

kicking off nsfw content and “female presenting nipples” is just another step of that old web disappearing, and the gates of capitalist, oppressive society going up again. and that’s what’s sad.