A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.
I'm not a physicist. But I have been skeptical of the hypothesis of dark matter/energy ever since I first read an article on the subject.
("Read" is a bit of an overstatement. I usually couldn't get past six paragraphs in Scientific American before they might as well have printed the rest of the article in Swedish, for all that I could understand it. But I digress.)
Dark matter/energy always struck me as being a massive fudge factor. But, since I couldn't get through the articles on it, it made little sense to write the science magazines and suggest that this particular emperorer has no clothes.
Still, this is what science does: Look at the data, the observations, and try to come up with a hypothesis as to how things work. More data, better observational tools and then the hypothesis changes to accomodate that.
"More data, better observational tools and then the hypothesis changes to accommodate that. "
ReplyDeleteUnless you're GOP or MAGA....
Oh well, the scientific method fails against bone-deep stupid.
Hubble threw the world for a tizzy when he discovered the universe was expanding at an accelerating the galaxies were rotating too fast stay together according to Einsteinian mechanics. There are still no field equations or force particle for gravity. Our boys and girls might have an angle on the force particle now https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/breakthrough-quantum-gravity
ReplyDeleteAs to the dark matter force particle, it's more elusive than the neutrino and we can make neutrinos in the lab now, so more real experiments can be had. WIMPS are still tricky bastards that our boys and girls are trying to detect.
Experimental efforts to detect WIMPs include the search for products of WIMP annihilation, including gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmic rays in nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters; direct detection experiments designed to measure the collision of WIMPs with nuclei in the laboratory, as well as attempts to directly produce WIMPs in colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particle
A more general view of the situation:
Dark matter exists It is now generally accepted in the scientific community that roughly 85% of the matter in the universe is in a form that neither emits nor absorbs electromagnetic radiation. Multiple lines of evidence from cosmic microwave background probes, measurements of cluster and galaxy rotations, strong and weak lensing and big
bang nucleosynthesis all point toward a model containing cold dark matter particles as the best explanation for the universe we see. Alternative theories involving modifications to Einstein’s theory of gravity have not been able to explain the observations across all scales. WIMPs are an excellent candidate for the dark matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) represent a class of dark matter particles that froze out of thermal equilibrium in the early universe with a relic density that matches observation. This coincidence of scales - the relic density and the weak force interaction scale - provides a compelling rationale for WIMPs as particle dark matter. Many particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model provide natural candidates for WIMPs, but there is a huge range in the possible WIMP masses (1 GeV to 100 TeV) and interaction cross sections with normal matter (10−40 to 10−50 cm2). It is expected that WIMPs would interact with normal matter by elastic scattering with nuclei [1], requiring detection of nuclear recoil energies in the 1-100 keV range. These low energies and cross sections represent an enormous experimental challenge, especially in the face of daunting backgrounds from electron recoil interactions and from neutrons that mimic the nuclear recoil signature of WIMPs. Direct detection describes an experimental program that is designed to identify the interaction of WIMPs with normal matter
https://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C1307292/docs/CosmicFrontier/WIMPDirect-24.pdf
Chapter and verse of the rabbit hole: https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept17/Freese/Freese_contents.html
TLDR
Emilie du Chatelet was on the road from Newton to Einstein. Voltaire was one of her consorts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT3BAWOpQ7Q
Carry on
To much deep scientific talk makes my head spin. All I know for sure is that there is a connection between Einstien and rubber sheets, also don't let the 'Dark Force' take over you like Anakin Skywalker.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem is that they still haven’t nailed down the value of the Hubbard Constant.
ReplyDeletehttps://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/measurements-relax-hubble-tension/#
What if the size and age of the universe is different than conventional thought?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/size-of-universe-bigger-than-age