It seems that all question I and any non-specialist can ask are stupid and irrelevant, but it's still so exciting to think of all the possibilities.
The notion is that a massive object like the Earth would act something like a lens, gravitationally. That isn't usually apparent, because most types of matter and energy would simply be absorbed when they hit the Earth. But dark matter (according to our best guesses today) can pass straight through the Earth just like light through a transparent object. So if there really are "streams" of dark matter all moving the same direction passing through us, they would act analogously to light rays through an ordinary lens. (And since there could be multiple streams going different directions, it could wind up looking like several light sources shining through that glass of water, with these "hairs" or focal points extending out in several directions.)
The two questions that come to my mind after reading this brief article are, 1) does the same thing happen with, say, solar neutrinos? (Maybe they're just too fast for the effect to be meaningful?) And 2) if they're going to talk about how much more Jupiter does this focusing than the Earth does, is there a reason they didn't go all the way and talk about potentially even stronger "hairs" created by the Sun itself? (Maybe those wind up focusing inside the star?)
I really don't see why!
"He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs.
[...]
I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body [...] Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight.[...] Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the composition of other unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids."
- H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond
Disclaimer: not physicist.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-04-gravitational-constant-vary.htm...
When looked at from the perspective of Gravitational lensing[A phenomenon that bends light] there is some kind of aether 2.0 with a mass that causes the gravitational lensing effect.
Personally I think this is the wrong approach to work with this. We know that a cause c1, was the result of phenomenon p1. We are assuming another cause c2, which is very similar to c1 MUST also be happening due to p1.
It might very well be there is a phenomenon p2 responsible for c2.
We seem to be trying to state cause(dark matter) in terms of its side effect(phenomenon similar to gravitational lensing) without understanding what it actually is.
Those are mostly neutrino detectors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector