Scientists Capture First Image of Dark Matter Web (inhabitat.com) 156
Kristine Lofgren writes: Scientists have long suspected that the universe is woven together by a vast cosmic connector but, until now, they couldn't prove it. Now, for the first time ever, scientists have captured an image of a dark matter bridge, confirming the theory that galaxies are held together by a cosmic web. Using a technique called weak gravitational lensing, researchers were able to identify distortions of distant galaxies as they are influenced by a large, unseen mass -- in this case, a web of dark matter. In order to create a composite image that shows the dark matter web, scientists had to look at more than 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away. "Results show the dark matter filament bridge is strongest between systems less than 40 million light years apart," reports Phys.Org. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Layers and layers (Score:2)
Looks like an onion, right?
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Not everybody like onions. How about parfait?
Re:Layers and layers (Score:4, Funny)
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This argument is getting tense.
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Not exactly direct evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not exactly direct evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
Or gravity doesn't act the same over longer distances, thus there appears to be "unexplained" attraction. So yeah, either gravity is different to what we think, or dark matter exists. This "evidence" seems to suggest either option.
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Wasn't there, rather recently, a claim by some scientists that that the calculations for the movement of galaxies are not correct thus we get results that can be explained only if you introduce the concept of dark matter/energy. I have no idea how serious this is...just some vague memory that it was in the news.
Re:Not exactly direct evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not exactly direct evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Err... no. That article was about dark energy, which isn't the same thing as dark matter.
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Err... no. That article was about dark energy, which isn't the same thing as dark matter.
In the Einstein universe, are they (matter & energy) not simply different states of the same thing? Being that mass and energy rarely appear separately, would not the presence of 'dark energy' strongly infer the existence of 'dark matter'?
I would take the discovery of 'dark energy' as being at least as strongly indicative, if not more, of the existence of 'dark matter' than data from weak gravitational lensing. Of course, it also depends on how solid the evidence is, and how trustworthy the methods used
Conflating terms (Score:5, Informative)
In the Einstein universe, are they (matter & energy) not simply different states of the same thing?
Yes if one isn't being super pedantic. Your "states" analogy is reasonable. To say matter and energy are the same thing isn't exactly accurate but it's good enough for all but the most picky of purposes. But applying that relationship to so called dark matter and dark energy is a little bit fraught because we don't actually know what dark matter and dark energy are. As a result you are understandably conflating some things.
The terms "dark matter [wikipedia.org]" and "dark energy [wikipedia.org]" are sort of placeholder terms to explain some phenomena that we don't entirely understand yet and they are more marketing terms than precise terms of art. We don't actually know for certain that what we call "dark matter" is actually matter or that "dark energy" is actually energy. We just have some observations we haven't been able to adequately explain so we needed some short hand terms to explain what we are seeing in terms of the models we have. One of three things is happening. Either we are seeing something new, we are making measurement errors, or our models are wrong. Possibly some combination of all three.
Dark matter arises out of the fact that we see some observations that don't make sense based on the amount of baryonic ("normal") matter we can quantify. Our models of how gravity works tell us that for our observations to match our models there must be a lot more matter than we can see presuming our models are correct. So called dark energy arises out of our observations and measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe but it's even less well understood than dark matter.
Being that mass and energy rarely appear separately, would not the presence of 'dark energy' strongly infer the existence of 'dark matter'?
Mass is not the same thing as matter. You can have matter without mass such as with a photon. Mass is a property in some forms of matter, all of which move slower than c (the speed of light).
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Mass is not the same thing as matter. You can have matter without mass such as with a photon.,
Can you really feel confident saying that photons are matter?
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Dark Energy and Dark Matter are just _names_
They are not connected in any way. It is not that one of them can be transformed into the other ... at least not as we know right now.
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The thing is, "dark matter" and "dark energy" are explaining different things, so they are not equivalent in the same way that everyday local matter and energy are.
The definition of "dark matter" is, in point of fact, "whatever it is that keeps galaxies from falling apart even though the outside spins faster than we think it should be able to". The definition of "dark energy" is "whatever it is that is causing distant galaxies to recede from us faster than we think they should".
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Dark matter used to be just matter we couldn't see that explained galactic rotation. It then became also the explanation for gravitational lensing where we can't detect matter, and an explanation for the makeup of the Universe. It appears to be a form of matter that doesn't interact electromagnetically. There have been attempts to detect dark matter particles with weak interactions, with AFAIK no success yet. The idea isn't far-fetched, as neutrinos are dark matter by the definition I gave, although ne
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No, it wouldn't infer any such thing. It might, however, IMPLY the existence of "dark matter".
Note, by the by, that your statement above allows me to infer that you don't know the difference between "imply" and "infer".
Alternately, in your statement above, you are implying that you don't know the difference between "imply" and "infer"....
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but i thought the movement of galaxies WAS the expansion of the universe.
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Dark Energy specifically refers to what ever force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate.
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I'll stop you guys here. This shit is way beyond me. Dont waste your time with me if you can help somebody that actually could understand that stuff.
Expansion of space (Score:4, Informative)
but i thought the movement of galaxies WAS the expansion of the universe.
The movement of the galaxies can help us measure and observe the expansion of the universe but isn't the expansion itself. To use a simpler example, imagine a galaxy is an ant and that ant is standing on the surface of a balloon. The ant can walk around the balloon which is equivalent to the galaxies moving through space. Now inflate the balloon. The ant is moved because space (the balloon surface in this example) became larger but it wasn't because the ant itself moved. What happened is space expanded and everything in space moves a bit further apart as a result. But those objects in space (ants) are still free to move through space so the expansion of space doesn't explain everything we see by itself.
What we see is the galaxies moving (mostly) away from each other through space AND we see space expanding because they are moving away from each other faster than can be explained by simple movement through space. Space can expand faster than the speed of light because c is only the speed limit for matter moving through space. Space itself can expand arbitrarily fast as far as we know.
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I'll stop you guys here. This shit is way beyond me. Dont waste your time with me if you can help somebody that actually could understand that stuff. #2
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An analogy : you're in bed, and the wife rolls over and pulls the duvet off you. This is movement of the duvet within the existing place. Ripping the wall off, building walls and a new piece of roof to extend the bedroom is expanding the space within which your duvet can move, but doesn't make the duvet itself change size.
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Dark Matter and Dark Energy are only related by name. Dark Matter is a model explaining the movement of galaxies while Dark Energy is a model describing the expansion of the universe.
And then there is Dark Gravity.
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Or gravity doesn't act the same over longer distances, thus there appears to be "unexplained" attraction. So yeah, either gravity is different to what we think, or dark matter exists. This "evidence" seems to suggest either option.
Ya, but if gravity is different, to fit the current observations, it would have to be so different that nobody has been able to come up with even theoretical set of rules that it would describe how it works, and it would probably have to be non-isotropic and turn out to have some sort of polarity like magnetic force.
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Or gravity doesn't act the same over longer distances, thus there appears to be "unexplained" attraction. So yeah, either gravity is different to what we think, or dark matter exists. This "evidence" seems to suggest either option.
Or that there is something else that is bending the light that travels toward us. Something like a lens that can bend light due to the different index of refraction. If there was a bunch of dust and gas, and that got more dense as you moved in toward the center of the blob of dust and gas, would bend light in a similar way to what dark matter appears to do.
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It also means that there's still wiggle room for those who are certain that it doesn't exist.
There appears to be a whole anti-DM subculture. Strong on here. Pretty fucking weird to be honest.
Re: Not exactly direct evidence (Score:2, Insightful)
Because dark matter isn't a thing, it's an observation that our current models don't accurately reflect our observations. Dark matter falls in the same category as the old aether theory; it may exist or maybe we're just wildly wrong. Assuming that it does is a fairly unscientific permits. We've had lovely theories before that turned out to be elegant failures.
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Dark matter is a model. As long as the model matches the observations, and there isn't a simpler model that does the same, the model is held to be correct.
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I don't think there is something wrong with postulating stuff to make our observations match our predictions. This is how science advances. Try explaining the observations of particle accelerators without postulating the existence of quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, or atoms for that matter.
The real criterion is whether the stuff you postulate has simple properties or it behaves like fairy dust, magically explaining everything by having several arbitrary properties. I think dark matter falls clearly in
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And I guess, does it lead to a novel prediction which later turns out to be true?
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Well, that is indeed the gold standard of theory falsification, but I think is not strictly necessary. If I have a theory that is both simple and consistent with all available data that theory is good enough for me.
But this is a bit beside the point, as we have the famous Baryon acoustic oscillations [wikipedia.org], which were predicted by cosmological models with dark matter, and then observed by WMAP and SDSS.
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If I have a theory that is both simple and consistent with all available data that theory is good enough for me.
God did it.
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That is an extremely complicated theory. Your "God" concept is not even well-defined. The best attempts to do it involve books with hundreds of pages, that are nevertheless full of contradictions.
Particles evolving under the laws of General Relativity, on the other hand, can be described in a few pages. The universe doesn't care about whether your primate brain understands it. There exists an objective measure of complexity - Kolmogorov complexity - and this is what science cares about.
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The real criterion is whether the stuff you postulate has simple properties or it behaves like fairy dust, magically explaining everything by having several arbitrary properties. I think dark matter falls clearly in the former category, as it can interact only through gravity, greatly restricting what it can do.
No, that only makes it weirder. If you can only interact with it via gravity, then that differentiates it from all the matter we've actually worked with so far. It requires that we change our understanding of physics. That's not simple.
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If we would go with "weird" as a criterion to discard theories, we wouldn't have quantum mechanics. Or relativity. Or electromagnetism. Or almost anything that goes beyond our day-to-day experience.
Of course, one needs a lot of evidence to accept a new kind of matter, as it does require changes to our fundamental theories. We do have such evidence, and we don't have any other theory that can explain it.
Re:Not exactly direct evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
We already have an example of weakly interacting matter, namely the neutrino, a particle BTW, that was first postulated to balance some equations (fusion) and then later found in the wild.
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Neutrons too. Half of everything around us is made up of things that would be great dark matter particles if they didn't decay outside a nucleus.
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Doesn't the neutron interact via the strong force as well? Even the neutrino interacts via the weak force whereas dark matter might not even do that.
As you imply, lots of particles don't interact via electromagnetism which might be similar to dark matter. I don't understand the hate/disbelief that dark matter gets as it isn't that different and would be interesting if it exists.
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The residual strong force, yes. We'd definitely see neutrons in dark matter proportions in particle searches, but they can fit a lot of the cosmological observations because they don't interact electromagnetically. Both the neutron and neutrino were theoretical objects before they were discovered, just like dark matter particles are today. There's nothing magic about new particles that are hard to detect, make theories work properly, and are later discovered.
The neutron was actually discovered just befor
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Dark matter is hardly the first type or class of particles that was postulated first, and then later demonstrated, so why DM gets such a bad rap when the work going on is no different than the work that went on nearly a century ago to determine the inner workings of the atom, and then later postulating classes of particles like quarks.
Either Einsteinian gravity has a problem, and it seems to work in all other instances (i.e. gravity lenses). This is a matter of parsimony; Occam's razor as you will. Either a
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I'll admit that I have my doubts, because it seems to have been postulated simply to make our observations match our predictions and because it appears to be defined as "something that has mass but can't be detected any other way."
That's what the "Dark" means - unexplained. We know it exists. We knows it's matter. We know it's "cold", i.e., not moving at nearly the speed of light as neutrinos do. That's all we know.
The first assumptions about what dark matter might be actually composed of - what sort of particles - haven't played out well. The hope is that dark matter would interact with familiar matter via the weak force, but the first detectors built haven't found anything.
But there's no real questions that it's "cold matter",
Not against dark matter (Score:3)
There appears to be a whole anti-DM subculture.
I don't think there are "anti-DM" people here outside of maybe a few wingnuts. There are lots of pro-evidence people here, myself included. The problem with dark matter is that there are at least three possible explanations, none of which have been conclusively ruled out. 1) Dark matter is indeed some form of matter as yet not fully understood, 2) Our measurements are in error somehow, and 3) our models for forces (gravity) are incorrect somehow.
I have a minor in applied physics so I'm not entirely uninf
Re:Not against dark matter (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a PhD in theoretical physics. Not in cosmology, but I have some contact with people who do work on it.
So, 2) is astronomically unlikely. The experimental evidence comes from multiple independent sources spanning decades. It consists of simple things such as measuring the rotational speed of galaxies and more sophisticated measurements such as anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. If you are willing to doubt this kind of evidence you might as well doubt GR itself.
As for 3), everyone and his dog likes to propose modified theories of gravity that would do away with dark matter. The problem is that reconciling them with the mountain of evidence for dark matter is really tough. The most popular candidates, MOND and entropic gravity are far from being able to do it. Until they do, we're stuck with 1).
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Not only independent sources - in the simple sense of "coming from many scientists or groups of scientists" - but also using multiple different distinct techniques from fundamental geometry on different scales (which is behind Doppler measurements of velocities) to sophisticated radiometry leading to the maps of the CMB temperature variations. The data is far wider than just having many different groups using similar techniqu
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It is unscientific to think our measurements couldn't be in error.
It is even more unscientific to assume the models are in error, just so you can wave them away.
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Good luck doing science with this conspiracy-theoretical mindset.
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Lots of physicists have written about why dark matter is a more attractive option than modified gravity. Measurement error is highly unlikely: the story is consistent across a wide variety of different types of measurements, many of them very basic. Cluster motion and galactic rotation curves require that you believe in the Doppler effect and spectroscopy. Gravitation lensing experiments require that you believe gravity bends light.
The biggest strike against particle dark matter is that we haven't found
Re:Not exactly direct evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
It also means that there's still wiggle room for those who are certain that it doesn't exist
I found this post on /r/space [reddit.com] pretty convincing. It's hard to argue with so many independent observations.
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Dark Matter does exist and has been photographed (well actually video taped). It has been broadcast on SyFy and Space (Canadian SciFi channel).
Oh, not that Dark Matter [imdb.com]. :-)
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not that the images actually show us Dark Matter.
Most people are "electromagnetic chauvinists", because all of their senses depend on an electromagnetic field in some way. If a physical phenomenon doesn't create an electromagnetic field, many people refuse to believe that it could exist. However, nothing in physics says that everything in the universe has to be able to create an electromagnetic effect.
In fact, dark matter does slightly alter electromagnetic fields by bending it over cosmic distances (as well as moving normal matter around). This isn't too
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"electromagnetic chauvinists" made me laugh. One internet for you, sir.
Bringing Light to Dark (Score:1)
Dark matter indirectly measured, dark energy debunked. Astrologers are kicking ass this month!
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Where was dark energy debunked?
Re:Bringing Light to Dark (Score:5, Interesting)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
If you consider a simulation 'debunking'. Given that it was only posited to exist due to mathematical calculations, that's good enough for me.
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When I saw that article a couple weeks back, I looked at the headline, then the date, and closed Slashdot.
Surprised to find it's an actual article.
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This Apr 1st, the stories all seemed to be actually true with slightly warped headlines and such subjects as that they all seemed to be hoaxes. (Only actually checked a couple)
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That article is about dark energy, not dark matter. Two entirely different things with similar names. It's like saying my browser can't use Javascript because Java is disabled.
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Astrologers are kicking ass this month!
Aries, the Ram, is quite good at that.
Dark matter does not exist. (Score:2)
Dark matter does not exist, Dark matter is just the name of a theory that scientists have come up with to describe some anomalous gravity data they got when they looked at how the universe was put together mainly how galaxies interact with each other.
As they could see something is interacting with the galaxies yet they could not directly detect what is causing the interaction they called it dark and as the general consensus is that in order for this amount of interaction it has to come from somewhere and th
Not proven either way (Score:3)
Dark matter does not exist
Dark matter certainly might exist. Or it might be measurement error. Or it might be model flaws. We simply aren't sure at this point. No one can say with any certainty that dark matter does not exist because the data isn't conclusive either way. Yes "dark matter" is something of a placeholder marketing term but it describes what appears to be a very real phenomena. There is some reasonable evidence to suggest dark matter is a real thing but none of it is conclusive at present. We have considerable co
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Dark matter certainly might exist. Or it might be measurement error. Or it might be model flaws. We simply aren't sure at this point.
Not true. We know dark matter exists as certainly as we know the Higgs boson exists, or any other modern physics discovery (all of which rely on may layers of inference between measurement and conclusion).
We don't know if that is the actual explanation but it's a necessity under current models if we presume they are correct.
Not true. It must exists for current observational evidence to be correct. To quote Feynman "it doesn't matter how elegant or well-accepted the theory, if it disagrees with observational evidence it's wrong.
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Spoken with the certainty of someone that knows nothing about the subject. Instead of being proud of your ignorance, you should try to read at least the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article about it.
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I did read what you wrote. If you had read the Wikipedia article you would know that
1) The evidence that dark matter is actually a new physical thing is overwhelming.
2) The evidence is not only "interactions between galaxies".
3) The theory does not allow for other causes of the interaction.
4) Everyone that works with it does use the name dark matter for the proposed particles (such as WIMPs, axions, or sterile neutrinos).
Question for the scientists (Score:2)
Does this Dark Matter Web have a URL?
Ethan? (Score:2)
...
Pirate Bay ... .. (Score:2)
should move to the dark-matter-web, a mesh of such complexity that not even God can find it.
Or block. (Score:2)
Dark matter makes up about a quarter of the universe, but it is difficult for us to detect it because it doesn’t reflect or shine light.
Or block light. That is the more important property I would think.
Re:misleading nonsense about fantasy matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm not an expert, but I can't help thinking that dark matter and dark energy are the equivalent of aether from when we did not understand electromagnetism, and the current state of our knowledge (relativity, quantum mechanics, etc) is just an intermediate step in the full understanding, and future physicists will laugh at us for this dark matter thing.
DE and DM are observations. DE = accerating cosmic expansion. DM = too much gravitation to be explained by luminous matter. Posit whatever the fuck you wish if you don't like the popular theories. Nothing has been decided, however much of slashdot wants 'there is no DM' to be the decision, regardless of what the evidence shows.
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You're right. But I still think there is no dark matter.
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While I agree with the spirit of your post, I think your description of Dark Energy is inaccurate. It is not simply the accelerated expansion of the universe, but more precisely explaining this accelerated expansion through a nonzero cosmological constant. While alternative explanations are considered implausible by the cosmologists, they are far from being inconceivable.
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DE and DM are observations.
No, they aren't. They're unsupported ideas about how to explain certain observations. And as soon as they make testable predictions which turn out to actually be the case, they can be science.
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DE and DM are observations.
No, they aren't. They're unsupported ideas about how to explain certain observations. And as soon as they make testable predictions which turn out to actually be the case, they can be science.
In the case of dark matter, the the observation is called the missing mass problem. This is the name we gave to the fact that at very large scales, gravity seemed to act like there was more mass than we had observed. There are two solutions to this problem:
1) There exists more matter that we cannot see, scientists are cheeky so they call it Dark Matter
2) Our existing theories of gravity are wrong.
Scientist have perused both of these the first by hunting for dark matter and the second through modifying
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First off, they are two entirely different things. Dark matter is the observation that galaxies and groups of galaxies behave as if they have a lot more mass than can be observed via the EM spectrum, and applying Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is that they have a lot more mass, not that Einstein was totally wrong. Dark energy is simply a place holder for whatever repulsive force is causing the acceleration of the universe to speed up.
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Why would future physicists laugh at us. Anyone with any understanding doesn't laugh at aether as it was a good, though wrong, explanation of the properties of light and seemed more believable then the idea of an absolute speed limit and light traveling at the same speed no matter your frame of reference, which really did sound like a fantasy.
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The aether story is overly simplified by people who don't understand history or physics.
Classical aether was disproven (sort of) by the Michaelson-Morely experiments. There were also contemporary proposals for aether that were compatible with those observations, and in fact are compatible with special relativity. Modern quantum field theory is essentially a relativistic, quantum aether theory: fields that permeate all of space, one for each particle.
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Good points. Part of the history of physics is a string of better/more accurate measurements.
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You know that modern quantum field theory holds that photons are excitations that move through a field that permeates all of space, right?
Additionally, there are similar fields for every other particle, which also permeate all of space.
Re:misleading nonsense about fantasy matter (Score:5, Insightful)
There has never been what I would consider "evidence" of dark matter, just evidence of a lack of understanding of matter, gravity, or space.
Of course you don't mention what it would take for you to consider evidence, your mind is clearly already made up from putting 'evidence' in scare quotes. But in any case - go ahead and explain the bullet cluster [wikipedia.org] then. I expect your take on things will be fascinating, it might even clear all this up for us.
Re:misleading nonsense about fantasy matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I think that the galaxy rotation problem, and consequently the bullet cluster problem, is a relativistic effect and no dark matter exists.
I.e. the existing visible matter warps space in such a way that it increases the rotation speed of the galaxy.
Any mass in space warps the space around it. It is proven again and again, with gravitational waves being the latest proof.
So a very simple explanation is gravity from the mass of the galaxy warps space in such a way that mass around it seems sped up.
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Galaxy rotation curves aren't related to the Bullet Cluster evidence. The Bullet Cluster shows gravitational lensing occurring where there is a lack of visible normal matter. What happened was that the two clusters collided and the regular matter, which can experience electromagnetic forces, gets mostly stopped in the middle of the collision due to friction of interstellar gas and dust. The anomalous lensing is occurring much further out do to the fact that dark matter just keeps going straight through a
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That was a solid argument about 15 years ago, and scientists were making it. Then we launched the WMAP [wikipedia.org] satellite, and measured the CMBR in great detail. The early universe was show to contain cold dark matter in the same proportion needed to explain galactic rotation, to two significant digits. (Cosmology with significant digits! Welcome to the future.)
There were many theories. One successfully predicted the next major observation, the others didn't. That's how science picks a winner.
Dark matter is st
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It's likely the actual IDing of what dark matter is is going to happen at LHC or a similar facility at some point in the future. We know there's a large amount of weakly-interacting matter out there, but exactly what it is is a question for particle physicists. I know from my reading that at least some physicists are hoping that dark matter may be one of the pathways beyond the Standard Model that has been expected for some time now.
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String theory predicts that all particles have masses that are an integer multiple of Planck mass. This is a fairly ridiculous prediction (all current particles with masses are explained as "close enough" to 0). I'm hoping dark matter turns out to be 1-Planck-mass particles, as much for the absurdity as for the fact that GR says it's impossible, which might give real insight into quantum gravity.
I would be surprised if dark matter actually does interact via the weak force, as I'd expect the first couple o
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So far as I can tell not even string theorists are really hopeful that the theory (whatever it may be, no one even has a useful version of the theory, or rather there are a huge number of string theories). At the moment, the real game is about supersymmetry.
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So a very simple explanation is gravity from the mass of the galaxy warps space in such a way that mass around it seems sped up.
Yes, astrophysics and cosmology are very simple when you don't bother with numbers.
I'd be happy to see your personal theory peer-reviewed, but I'm afraid the reviewers will probably want to see some numbers. For bonus points, make some falsifiable quantitative predictions. ("Future scientists will laugh at today's dark-matter theories" doesn't count.)
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Except that we have General Relativity, which has been found to be correct time and again, which tells us exactly how the galaxy warps space and what that causes. If this is how it works, then we need some sort of modified gravity theory. Real live physicists have been coming up with modified gravity theories to explain galactic rotation for a long time. None of them work real
Re:misleading nonsense about fantasy matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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"fantasy matter"?! Come on, you can do better than that. This is about science, not politics. Or is there a anti-dark matter conspiracy theory I was unaware of?
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So like much of physics. Neutrinos were postulated to balance the fusion equations and the idea of particles that didn't interact and could travel right through the Earth was laughed at. Previously the idea of electrons to explain electricity and much else.
Re: misleading nonsense about fantasy matter (Score:2)
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No, it's not that we're experts, it's that we're old enough to know the current crop of "experts" are selling a hot load of manure.
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DM almost certainly exists.
Go on, tell us all about it [keelynet.com].
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Which has nothing to do with Dark Matter that I can tell.
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Aw, it's been years since an electric universe nut posted on Slashdot. Happy memories!