'Dark Matter' Galaxy Found

OK, this isn't sub-related, but I think this stuff is really cool. I expect A. E. Brain will have a more substantive post on this later, but this Yahoo report on a possible 'dark matter' galaxy is really fascinating. An excerpt:

"Theorists have long said most of the universe is made of dark matter. Its presence is required to explain the extra gravitational force that is observed to hold regular galaxies together and that also binds large clusters of galaxies.
Theorists also believe knots of dark matter were integral to the formation of the first stars and galaxies. In the early universe, dark matter condensed like water droplets on a spider web, the thinking goes. Regular matter -- mostly hydrogen gas -- was gravitationally attracted to a dark matter knot, and when the density became great enough, a star would form, marking the birth of a galaxy.
The theory suggests that pockets of pure dark matter ought to remain sprinkled across the cosmos. In 2001, a team led by Neil Trentham of the University of Cambridge predicted the presence of entire dark galaxies."

I've been fascinated by the fast pace of potenial breakthoughs in physics for the last couple of years, particularly with "superstring" or "M-theory" that has a chance of unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity. If you ever get a chance to see the NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" I would urge you to do so, or even read Brian Greene's books. (I'm re-reading The Fabric of the Cosmos now...) To me, it all just makes sense; the universe ought to operate by consistent laws, and having all matter and energy have the same basic form, varying only by it's vibrational energy, is all very elegant; after all, as a nuke I know that mass and energy are easily converted between each other...

Going deep...

Update 0941 24 Feb: I was right! Continuing on with my thoughts on the "new cosmology" that's been discussed in the last few years, especially inflationary expansion. I always wondered how, if everything is limited to the speed of light, how we could be seeing objects 13 billion light years away if our galaxy were not moving at at least half the speed of light (which we clearly are not) -- as we would have had to be to get that far from another object in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang. The proposed answer now is that space itself expanded rapidly very soon after the Big Bang; there's no limit on how fast space can expand, and light still moves at the same speed through the space in which it exists; it's just that that space has gotten relatively bigger. Now, we're finding out that the universe is actually increasing in its rate of expansion, meaning that there's some kind of "anti-gravity" at work at trans-galactic distances; many scientists postulate that this is due to as yet undiscovered "dark energy" that they theorize makes up more than 70% of the total energy in the universe. Anyway, it's fascinating to me...