Chrissy Simon 6/3/13
Core Earth
Science/ Ms. Davies
Wilford, John. "
Astronomy Crisis Deepens As the
Hubble Telescope Sees No Missing Mass." New York Times.
29 Nov 1994.
Many scientists have been on a mission to
understand the universe. They are unable to determine the nature of the shadowy
substance whose gravitational pull is the force that is organizing the
evolution and overall structure of the universe. Over the last four decades, evidence for this missing mass
has become overwhelming. If
it were not for huge quantities of some hidden matter, galaxies would not be
clustering, as they tend to do. They would be flying off in all directions. By
most estimates, this missing matter constitutes more than 90 percent of the
universe's total mass. "It's
a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can't find 90 percent of the
universe," sighed Dr. Bruce H. Margon, an astrophysicist at the University
of Washington at Seattle. Identifying
the nature and amount of dark matter is the main problem in cosmology today. Astronomers
keep hoping that a significant portion of dark matter is made of giant planets,
faint or failed stars or powerful gravitational sinks known as black holes. However
this is not the case. The Hubble Space Telescope found that red dwarfs are actually quite thin, which is a
negligible component of cosmic mass. This
setback has shifted more of the burden of the search from observational astronomers
to particle physicists. Some
of the cosmic mass, particle physicists suggest could be in the form of
fast-moving neutrinos, subatomic particles that pervade the universe. They are known
byproducts of the Big Bang but no one yet is sure if neutrinos have any mass. The
missing mass could be something more exotic and sluggish, which they call cold
dark matter. Some
astronomers believe that neutrinos do have a finite mass. Astronomers have not given up on finding
more ordinary matter that could be part of the dark matter. They continue to
search for low-mass stars, Jupiter-size planets and other faint objects, which
they think may be on the outer edges of galaxies. The turmoil of clashing
concepts and the continuing failure to find what most of the universe is made
of might be cause for some to question science's faith in the optimistic
assumption.
I think that this article is
important to society since the abundance of this invisible mass could dictate
the fate of the universe. This line of investigation could have profound
philosophical implications. If most of the universe is discovered to be
composed of exotic material never before seen and absolutely unlike the
"ordinary" matter of stars, of Earth and of all life, the effect on
human thinking could be more important than the Copernican revolution, which
revealed that Earth was not the center of the universe or even the solar
system. By learning the type and abundance of dark matter, theorists could
finally solve the problem of explaining how a universe that began as smooth and
uniform and evolved into the large-scaled clumpiness of galaxies. Theorists
would also like to resolve the dark-matter problem because the ultimate fate of
the universe will be determined by how much mass there is. There are different
theories about the mass and the balance of the universe, from the “big crunch”
to the “big chill.” Between these two extremes, there is a more attractive
possibility, a condition called critical density. In this case, the mass would
be precisely what is necessary to keep the universe in balance between
expanding forever and eventually collapsing.
While the paper is well written and
contains a significant amount of scientific data, the author’s writing style is
too informal. For example, describing a physicist’s focus on a theory, the
author states that the scientist is “not throwing in the towel.” For a serious,
scientific article, the writing style of the author seems too colloquial. Also,
I think the author put too much detail and information in this article. At
times, I was overwhelmed with the amount of facts and theories in the article.
Despite these two issues, I enjoyed reading the article and learned a lot about
the Universe.
I read Chrissy Simon's response to the article about the astronomy crisis over missing mass in the universe. One thing that Chrissy did well was that she gave scientists and astronomers' opinions on the matter of the issue as well as her own. Also, I thought her response had very good flow and structure to it. She didn't just throw out facts in clumps, instead she had a nice flow to her response and inserted information when needed. That was a third thing that Chrissy did very well; her facts and information. It appeared as if she was an expert on the matter as she used various scientific terms. Essentially everything in this response was new to me. The concept itself that there is missing mass in this universe was overwhelming. The quote from the scientist that they could not find 90% of the universe was a statistic I had never heard of. Also, I learned that galaxies are very close together and without the gravitational pull they would be flying in all directions. Overall, Chrissy's article was very well written and descriptive, however, in the beginning of the response, it was a little bit unclear what she was talking about. Also, you had some very advanced words in your response however, I was unfamiliar with some and an explanation would have been helpful.
ReplyDeleteCrissy Simon’s current event report was on the dark matter of space. In general her review was very well written and professional. She had a lot of details about the topic. This show of knowledge made it clear that she took the time to not only read her article but to fully understand it before writing her report. Taking the time to learn all of these strange happenings in the science world gave Crissy the ability to explain well. Although this article may have been hard to read if you did not know anything about space, the new stuff that we did not learn in class she explained in a way that the reader could understand. Crissy also did a good job looking beyond the article. She made connections to the world and she critiqued the article she read in a very reasonable manner. Her suggested improvement of making the article more professional sounding shows her experience with scientific articles and her understanding of what should be included. I learned a lot from this report and it really made me think. I am always shocked by how big the universe really is. Crissy explains how planets and stars only make up 10% of the universes mass. It seems impossible that there is so much out there. It really makes us start to think about how small we are compared to the rest of the world and to the rest of space. I am also always shocked by how much we do not know. There is 90% of the mass of the universe we cannot figure out. Reading this article made me realize that although we have made a lot of advancements in space there is so much left to learn. We will soon find that are trips to mars are nothing compared to what is coming next. It is like Europeans finding America; they didn’t know that there was so much of it. This report was very thought provoking. The one improvement I would suggest would be to explain how discovering this mass would explain the fate of the universe. It was mentioned several times but I never really understood how. I understand how it can change the way we think of things but I do not see how we can determine what will happen from missing mass. Overall this was a great report that showed a lot of thought and work went into writing it.
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