Posted on 09/22/2016 3:59:44 PM PDT by sparklite2
Now a team led by Case Western Reserve University researchers has found a significant new relationship in spiral and irregular galaxies: the acceleration observed in rotation curves tightly correlates with the gravitational acceleration expected from the visible mass only.
"Galaxy rotation curves have traditionally been explained via an ad hoc hypothesis: that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter," said David Merritt, professor of physics and astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. "The relation discovered by McGaugh et al. is a serious, and possibly fatal, challenge to this hypothesis, since it shows that rotation curves are precisely determined by the distribution of the normal matter alone. Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely."
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Who cares? People who are invested in the existence of black matter,
astrophysicists, and people who are interested in science.
This is huge.
Damn, I did it again. Black = dark.
black matter lives.
Sparklite2, is this really “breaking news”? I ask because, if I recall correctly, these observations were discussed by Timothy Ferris in his book entitled The Whole Shebang, copyright 1997. I am not a scientist, not even an amateur one, but I did enjoy Ferris’ book.
I always considered dark matter analogous to the ancient aether: a convenient construction to explain what could not objectively be explained.
I didn’t post it in breaking news, but now that you mention it...
And dark matter, I thought, was a working explanation in today’s physics, which is why this upsets the apple cart.
Me, too. It’s cool to see we may have been right to be skeptical all along.
I wouldn’t celebrate yet (I have no idea why non-experts hate the theory of dark matter).
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-dark-matter-exists-a122bd606ba8
Great article. Thanks for posting. The article posted by the OP seems to challenge the second of 5 reasons.... interesting development.
If their calculations are right, then the presence of dark matter is not required to explain the internal motion of galaxies. This says nothing about the way they move wrt each other. It just weakens the argument for dark matter a bit.
But see below the article posted by moonman62. It seems that previously dark matter was well accepted as contributing to galaxy rotation so the jury is still out. This is just one result. It needs to be confirmed.
That’s my take as well. The result enables ordinary matter to explain intragalactic motion, but not intergalactic motion and other big-scale phenomena.
If, as the article indicates, the current dark matter model is intimately tied up with intragalactic motion, that would seem to rule it out for everything else as well.
Think I’ll to turn that into a School House Rock song.
Wow. Really interesting.
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