Posted on 03/28/2018 10:45:44 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks.
Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than we'd expect, as if they were actually much more massive than the stars we can see indicate.
Astrophysicists have come up with two main solutions to this problem. Either there's a lot of mass out there in the universe that we can't detect directly, mass scientists call dark matter, or there's no dark matter out there, but there is something missing from our laws of gravity and motion. Researchers call the second proposed solution modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), which suggests that if the laws are properly tweaked, the universe would make sense without dark matter.
So NGC 1052DF2 is a head-scratcher whether you lean toward dark matter or toward MOND. But physicists contacted by Live Science to discuss this paper mostly said the finding made dark matter (already the dominant explanation for the universe's weirdness) look a lot more likely.
The thing about dark matter, or whatever's causing outer space to move so weirdly, is that it's predictably distributed throughout the universe. Physicists expect the dark matter "halo" around lightweight, dim galaxies like NGC 1052DF2 to be extra big, and they expect to find less evidence of dark matter effects in more-massive galaxies. Similarly, MOND theorists expect to find the most significant observable effects of their modified laws in less massive galaxies like NGC 1052DF2, and lesser effects in more-massive galaxies.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
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We will have to have the FBI do a sham looking into this "lack of matter."
True, but it’s been almost a century since the last big “paradigm shift” in science, so it may be that we are finally ready for a shake up.
I think sometimes we just have to wait for the old generation of scientists to die off before the younger ones who aren’t as set in their ways can step in and advance theories that take things in a new direction.
It’s a gentrified galaxy.
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