Dark Matter Debate
The cluster focuses on discussions about the nature and evidence for dark matter, including its definition as undetected mass inferred from gravitational effects, debates on whether it's actual matter or a flaw in gravity theories like MOND, and comparisons with observations such as galaxy rotation curves and the Bullet Cluster.
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"Dark matter" just means "stuff we can't detect except by gravity" so that covers your first case.There's a theory that "dark matter" isn't matter at all, but some modification to the currently accepted laws of physics. Wikipedia lists some of these ideas:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Alternative_theori...</
No its not a hypothetical. The measurements are there. Something unexpected is happening and nobody knows for certain what.The problem is someone picked the misleading name "Dark Matter" and then pop science, and actual scientists talking to laymen did the massive disservice of wording the explanation in such a way as to make it sound like there is a real theory that proposes there is some matter that interacts with gravity yet is invisible and undetectable in literally every other
Not quite. Dark matter is the hypothesis that the discrepancy between theory and observation is due to a form of matter that interacts gravitationally but not electromagnetically. So we can't see it, and thus "dark".There are other competing ideas including a family of modified Newtonian dynamics models, but nothing comes as close as explaining the observations as dark matter does.There was a paper recently that showed that the discrepancy may be the higher order terms from
Can someone that knows a bit more about this explain why we believe that this dark matter substance must exist and not simply that we have an incorrect model of gravitation?
Could that mean that we don't need a dark matter theory?
Its ignorance. There are very good reasons why Astronomers haven't chucked out Dark Matter. And yes, they have thought of the 5 minute HN remarks and already dealt with them.
Here’s an overview of why dark matter is the leading theory: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rNFzvii8LtCL5joJo/dark-matte...
TBF: doesn't the same apply to dark matter? It originated because something didn't fit, and it was an easy explanation, without further evidence.
Why don't they want to ditch dark matter? It is more plausible candidate to ditch :)
What percentage of dark matter could this explain?