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Announcements. Last Observing Night tonight. Weather does not look promising.
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Announcements • Last Observing Night tonight. Weather does not look promising. • Our final exam period is Monday May 6 @ 1:30pm. Will do project presentations first then Exam 4. Exam 4 will be all essay, probably five out of nine. It will cover Chapters 12 – 17. Sample essay questions will be posted by the end of the week.
Our Cosmic Address Our home galaxy: The Milky Way The Milky Way is one of several dozen galaxies in the Local Group
The Virgo Cluster and Beyond The Virgo Cluster is the closest large galaxy cluster The Local Group, Virgo Cluster and several other galaxy clusters form the Local Supercluster
The largest known structures are the galaxy filaments and voids
The First Stars end the Dark Age These stars would have been massive (200 – 400 Msun), living short lives and exploding in supernovae
When and how did the first galaxies form? The first galaxies didn’t look anything like today’s galaxies. The first stars seeded them with “metal” but they would have been violent places with many mergers
The Case for Dark Matter If the galaxies consisted of only luminous matter the velocity should fall off with distance from the nuclear bulge
More Evidence of Dark Matter The total mass in the foreground galaxies lenses the background galaxies. Computations show there is far more mass present than is visible
And even more evidence Hot intergalactic gas is held to the galaxy clusters by the gravity of more mass than is visible
What is the Dark Matter? MACHO’s: Massive Compact Halo Objects MACHO’s are lone black holes, old neutron stars, cool white dwarfs and rogue planets. They can only account for a few percent of the dark matter
Detecting MACHO’s While a number of MACHO’s have been detected, there aren’t enough of them to account for all the dark matter
WIMP’s Weakly Interacting Massive Particles WIMP’s interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity
Neutrinos are WIMP’s Since they are moving at almost the speed of light they are hot dark matter
Neutrino’s do have mass The best current experiments indicate a mass of an eV or less, depending on the type of neutrino
Neutrino’s have been detected since the 1980’s The first detection of neutrino’s was at the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead SD
Modern neutrino detectors can detect all neutrino flavors The Sudbury Neutrino Detector
Cold WIMP’s Particle accelerators should produce them. While we won’t see the WIMP directly, we can detect its decay particles Solid state detectors held at near absolute zero should be able to detect them
While no direct detection of cold WIMP’s has occurred, there are limits on the possible mass
Is the dark matter cold or hot? We know neutrino’s, which are hot dark matter, exist. Large numbers of them would have been created during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and earlier. But, their mass is too small to significantly impact structure formation. Watch Structure Formation CDM video