More Like Purple Matter, Eh?

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer and well-established numeral sympathizer, is up to his usual tricks. Using pretty pictures of faraway objects to push his radical (√) agenda on the unsuspecting skeptic public. This time, the object of fancy is a supercluster named Abell 2744, allegedly 3.5 billion light-years away. View at your own risk:


Okay, fine. It's pretty. Real pretty. But what are we really looking at? Dark matter. The "mysterious matter" allegedly holding galaxies together amidst the alleged "acclerated expansion" of the alleged "universe." How are we looking at it? In false color. FALSE COLOR. This image is a LIE!

Says the alleged author of "12 bazillion blog articles:"

"We can piece together a history of an object with hundreds of trillions of stars spanning quintillions of kilometers of space and hundreds of millions of years in time. And that, my friends, is what scientists do."

That's right, Phil. You make up big numbers like trillion and bazillion and quintillion so we can ooh and ahh. Well, I'm not oohing and ahhing. Except for that first sentence which was for demonstration purposes. And the one after which used the gerund of the terms "ooh" and "ahh." And this most recent one which was for clarification purposes.

---