5 ms·
They have, and it has a great name: MACHO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_obje
by didgeoridoo 6y ago
They have, and it has a great name: MACHO
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
- Loughla 6y agoOne of my favorite things about astronomers/space science in general is that they let their geek flag fly when they name things.
- captaincrowbar 6y agoMy favourite example comes from the development of the modern picture of the formation of the solar system, when it was suggested that giant planets often swapped places during the early days of this and other planetary systems. This idea (now widely accepted as probably true) was known as the Jumping Jupiter hypothesis.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 6y agoAnd of course the main competing hypothesis—which appears to be winning—is WIMPs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_par... (Note that confusingly, while both are called "massive", the mass of an average MACHO would be somewhere between 50 and 60 orders of magnitude greater than that of a WIMP!)
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoI'm under the impression that WIMP uses "massive" in the sense of "not-massless"?
- Sharlin 6y agoIndeed, though I believe any candidate WIMPs would also have a fairly high mass as far as fundamental particles go, at least on the order of tens of GeV (which is to say tens of times the mass of proton).
- lutorm 6y agoI think they're "massive" in relation to the weakly-interacting-and-very-much-not-massive neutrinos, which were another dark matter candidate.
- twic 6y agoNamed by astronomers, who think carbon is a metal, so what do you expect.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]