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Not necessarily. Both Jesus and Mary got up there without any wings. Sometimes angels are depicted with wings, sometimes without: they're optional.

One explicit avoidance of outright technobabble was the baryon sweep, which was an attempt to not just make something up http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/1043

Our Guidelines link to RationalWiki for logical fallacies: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

Relished it! This is my contribution to your subtopic: And the original: Goosebumps, honest. Bach reigns supreme. Enough said.

DM is of course what is needed along with the observed matter, that explains the gravitational rotation of galaxies and large scale structure of the universe. It is termed "dark"not because it is non luminous but because we are ignorant at this time, as to its nature. It is thought by many to be some unknown form of non baryonic matter, that interacts only via gravity, and that is evidenced by the bullet cluster anomaly.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster Other thoughts are microscopic or primordial BH's that may have formed just after the BB. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/126284-primordial-black-holes/

At least someone did...

This has reminded me of, (My emphasis.) Interesting approach, the 'cognitive' one. Angel = hidden mechanism that people (especially in ancient times) indulged in very often --anthropomorphisation of just about everything they didn't understand. I value this approach. I wish I understood it better. I rather lean towards the archaeological/historical perspective,* which is the direction in which I've tried --unsuccessfully, I have to say-- to bring the discussion. To me, the closest we can get to understanding how or why these old timers came up with this angel stuff, is by digging under the ground and then thinking rationally about what their possible motivations must have been. The fact that these intermediaries between people and the gods had wings --Sumer, Akkad, Babylon's cherubim-- does not surprise me at all. Birds appear as symbols of deities as far back as Gobekli Tepe --end of the last glacial period ca. 11000 years ago. In other early human settlements birds also appear depicted as taking the decapitated bodies of the dead. The bird appears strongly in Egypt too. It must have symbolised a connection between the living and the dead for obvious reasons. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, it's vultures we're talking about. Now, it doesn't take a long stretch of the imagination to conjecture a possible reason why people believed that vultures were sacred beings in charge of helping the transit of the deceased to the netherworld. One small step, I think, takes the average Bronze-Age sophisticated mind from different kinds of birds to different kinds of angels. * They're not mutually exclusive, of course.

OK. I don't really know. But I know better than to believe in angels. The best vantage point is that of asking questions. Like, Why do angels have two bird-like wings, like avians, and no mechanism to correct for direction (tail wings) which is essential to fly? Are their wings just ornament? The design that's presented in current mythology is a desaster, from an engineering POV. Perhaps they use a bat-like design with membranes that can bend more freely? Do they succumb to temptation? Or perhaps they did only before the beginning of history, and then things went perfect OK from then on? And thousand and thousands more questions that I won't entertain anymore, because there's only so much time I can spend on a monumentally stupid idea, like 'angels exist'. Bots do exist, OTOH.

Cherubim are mythical creatures with wings that protected the entrance to temples all across the Levant. It probably comes from a word of Akkadian origin, 𒅗𒊒𒁍 karābu , which means 'to bless'. Successive morphings of both the concept and the imagery, have happened throughout the centuries, to end up with the Christian ones. Josiah king of Judah was the first, to the best of my knowledge, to try to unify aspects of ancient Middle-Eastern religions into a cohesive monotheism --very much for political reasons. Akhenaten of Egypt excluded --that was a very different kind of monotheism, IMO. There goes Ashera --wife of Yaweh--, which becomes a stick; there comes (reborn) Baal-Zebub --very abundant on hilltops, with the form of a bull--, which becomes the lord of the flies --another name for Satan--, etc. And of course, the ancient Hebrews had a bunch of other deities, which had to be conveniently fused into the general concepts of either helpers of God, or enemies of God. None of these things is proven beyond any doubt, but they're well understood, and very cogently so, if you study the history of the times, especially after the Assyrian-domination century and the annexation of Israel by Judah, and you pay attention to what's being discovered underground (archaeology). And if you get even the remotest idea of what happened in Constantinople during the first centuries AD, it's no mystery that we still talk about them several millenia after these things were concocted. I forgot to say: Quetzalcoatl, the fethered --if not winged-- snake, is not real either. Nana Mouskouri, OTOH, is real enough. I suppose what I mean to say is: No, there are no angels.

Two versions of Bach's Prelude No.1 Gives me chills this one:

There is not much point people here reciting basic information that is widely available on-line. Suggest reading, say, the Wiki article and then asking any questions you have arising from that. But I must say this is a very odd question for someone who teaches astronomy to be asking.

Dark matter is what we know, about what we don't know...