Missing Matter Caught in Tangled Cosmic Webs

Found at Space.com

Cosmologists are always complaining about their inability to find the dark matter in the universe, invisible stuff that's supposedly more prevalent than regular matter. They don't even know what it is, so of course they can't see it.

Meantime, a whole bunch of normal matter is missing, too.

Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos.

"It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is," as Livio puts it, "even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth."

OK, so now I feel a whole lot better about my own missing matter and my own tangled cosmic webs. I'm a mere reflection of the whole. So, it's not even my fault, and since not even really smart and compulsively over educated scientific minds can figure it out, I'm off the hook there too. How cool is that?

Oh, and check this out... it's a Space Ghost!



Described as a "dusty curtain" or "ghostly apparition", mysterious reflection nebula vdB 152 really is very faint. It lies about 1400 light-years away, along the northern Milky Way in the royal constellation Cepheus. Near the edge of a large molecular cloud, pockets of cosmic dust in the region block light from background stars or scatter light from the embedded bright star (top) giving parts of the nebula a characteristic blue color. Ultraviolet light from the star is also thought to cause a dim reddish luminescence in the nebular dust. Though stars do form in molecular clouds, this star seems to have only accidentally wandered into the area, as its measured velocity through interstellar space is very different from the cloud's velocity.

So, the universe is composed of missing stuff and stars wander around and accidentally get involved with space ghosts?? And nobody knows for sure what's going on? I'm telling you... this sounds seriously similar to what goes on in my house!!