Moustakas and I sat down with Jo Bovy (NYU) to discuss his short-term project of measuring the transparency of galaxy clusters. We are interested in two things: (1) can we measure the amount of dust in the clusters, and does it make sense given the plasma temperature and the metallicity, and (2) can we rule out a class of naive axion models for the dark matter, which generically cause wavelength-dependent transparency variations in regions of high magnetic field? This all might sound crazy, but there hasn't been much work on the transparency of the Universe since the 80s, and the data have gotten much better. I expect us to put very strong limits and rule out some theories.
Or win the Nobel Prize!
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