https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_XqHWx-v_Y

There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.

I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.

We are surrounded by dark objects, a rock is a dark object, exoplanets are dark objects, and so are black holes. Pretty much everything but stars are dark objects. They are all dark because they don't emit light.

Here, I think they mean stuff (whatever it is) that can only be detected by gravitational lensing, and it makes sense that it has to be extremely heavy, because gravity is so weak.

They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.

RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.

FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.1258

The paper is more about the technical achievement of detecting it, IIUC. It’s not the first dark matter inference we’ve had, and doesn’t really tell us anything new about the stuff.

The research team detected it only through its gravitational lensing effect — the way it slightly distorted the light from a more distant galaxy. There’s no emission at any wavelength (optical, infrared, or radio), and its gravitational signature matches a million-solar-mass clump of invisible mass rather than a compact point source like a black hole.

They specifically interpret it as a dark matter subhalo — one of the small, dense lumps that simulations of “cold dark matter” predict should pepper the universe’s larger halos. It’s too massive to be a single star, far too diffuse to be a stellar remnant, and not luminous enough to be a faint galaxy.

So “dark” here isn’t just shorthand for “too dim to see at this distance” — it’s used in the literal physical sense: matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light at all, detectable only via gravity.

Eventually, all the dark matter clumps into rings around galaxies, but since this one is so distant, ~10B light years, so we are seeing that clump as it was that long ago before it difused into it's ring shape we can see in the galaxies around us.

Assuming this is repeatable, it will take a while to contextualize.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20

> This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.

There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.

That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...