This is beautiful:
"Recently, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite made precision measurements of the imprint of sound waves on the cosmic microwave background, produced some 400,000 years after the big bang. Because sound propagation depends on the properties of the medium--as anyone who has played with a helium balloon knows--the pattern of the sound waves viewed by WMAP is an indicator of the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe."
i thought this particularly interesting -
"It is estimated that our solar system is passing through a fine sea of dark matter particles with a density as high as roughly 105 per cubic meter. We may hope to detect the flux of dark matter passing though the Earth, and even to detect the seasons of dark matter, corresponding to the times of year when the Earth is moving with, or against, the flow of dark matter orbiting the center of the Milky Way."
- because a couple of years ago I submitted a question to MadSci Network
Q: (May 23 2007) Does dark matter have a measurable effect upon the orbits of planets?
A: ...Dark matter doesn't impact the orbits of planets significantly. Because we don't know how to detect dark matter directly, it is hard to know its exact distribution. Most of the mass of local dark matter is located in a halo surrounding our galaxy (likewise for all other galaxies), but whether that means we are in an area devoid of dark matter or not isn't certain. But even if there is dark matter around us, its density would be both low and nearly uniform- imagine a thin gas made of dark matter. The orbits of the planets are dominated by the large mass concentration of the Sun (and to a small extent, Jupiter). Neither a thin gas of dark matter around us, nor the much greater mass found outside our visible galaxy, can affect planetary motion.
In short, "No"
