DARK MATTER MYSTERY...

Any time your ass is on a beach somewhere, every grain of sand would represent a star a.k.a. a Sun.  And there's a hell lot of beaches on our good earth. What astronomers call our "neighborhood"  in the creatively named "Local Group" is just a very titchy wee bit of the known universe. These folk of science plod on among the great mysteries to bring us an ever better view of how insignificant we are in the vastness; but then, our arrangement of atoms which can actually grasp anything at all, is perhaps the biggest mystery. For the latest from the boffins of physics, read on.

A dark matter bridge in our cosmic neighborhood

By using the best available data to monitor galactic traffic in our neighborhood, Noam Libeskind from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and his collaborators have built a detailed map of how nearby galaxies move. In it they have discovered a bridge of dark matter stretching from our Local Group all the way to the Virgo cluster—a mass of some 2,000 galaxies roughly 50 million light-years away, that is bound on either side by vast bubbles completely devoid of galaxies. This bridge and these voids help us understand a 40 year old problem regarding the curious distribution of dwarf galaxies. Next time around the water cooler, try striking up a conversation on the above and clear the area quicker than a man with a mega flatulence attack.