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On an interstellar scale, maybe this could create the lensing effects and explain some other phenomena. Is it unreasonable that 5/6 of the mass of the universe is like the stuff that makes up planets, but isn't lit up as brightly as a star?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand it, gravity is the interaction between things with mass, but it's a weak interaction, thus hard to detect on a particle by particle basis. You might be able to detect if there's an extra potato in a bag because a potato is a whole bunch of particles. But identifying that just a few of those particles are not the regular stuff -- protons, electrons, etc. -- by weighing the bag, would be difficult.
But you do not need to measure it particle by particle. Just because those have mass, there should be a bunch of dark matter particles hanging around with earth. And given that we have quite good idea what earth consists of, there should be a discrepancy in some of the measurements that use earth's mass against the mass we have from our understanding of earth's composition. Unless, of course, the extra mass of earth…
If we can't detect it or disprove it, it doesn't even belong to science. It belongs to the same realm as witches and demons - until some smart physicist devises a way to actually detect it.
We have a room filled with one foot of iron, one foot of sand, one foot of water, one foot of air, and some empty space filled with god knows what needs to be filled in order to balance the gravity equations. There is one group of people looking for particles less dense than air to fill the rest of the room. I am in the group that's looking at the other end for particles denser than iron, and I firmly believe they ar…
If you don't form your beliefs based on where the evidence leads you then you are not following science, period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has mass, so it by definition interacts with anything with mass? Yeah, but the only interaction is gravity. And nothing that clumps these particles together (such as the electro-magnetic force for ordinary matter). > Are these particles supposed to be so small and so rare that they can't be measured even at the scale of solar system? The additional mass can be measured, this is why we suspect the particles are t…
> The additional mass can be measured, this is why we suspect the particles are there in the first place :) Yes, in interstellar scale. How much there should be dark matter within solar system? 1 gram? 1 kilogram? I mean, if there was supposed to be 5/6 parts of mass of dark matter within solar system, it would quote obviously be somehow observable?
People speculate that maybe there is some weird particle that we can't see in any other way than through looking at the mass of these large (really, really, really ridiculously large) structures. But is there any of it in the solar system? In our galaxy? Nobody knows. Does it hang out between galaxies? Between galaxy clusters? Does it even really exist? Nobody knows.
You're just jumping way, way, way too far down the way ;-) Literally, dark matter could be anything -- even a misunderstanding about how the universe works. That's what's interesting about it.
So, basically physicists have deduced two facts, and these facts don't agree with one another. From this they conclude that there must be something else in the universe, something unseen and undetectable, that they call dark matter. But what about the other possibility, which seems far more reasonable to me, that either one of the facts is wrong?
This may be a dumb question, but could dark matter just be regular matter, like planetoids? What if interstellar space had a light sprinkling of things like Oumuamua? On an interstellar scale, maybe this could create the lensing effects and explain some other phenomena. Is it unreasonable that 5/6 of the mass of the universe is like the stuff that makes up planets, but isn't lit up as brightly as a star?
If we can't detect it or disprove it, it doesn't even belong to science. It belongs to the same realm as witches and demons - until some smart physicist devises a way to actually detect it.
It's detecting it through other interactions that's proving extremely difficult.
This may be a dumb question, but could dark matter just be regular matter, like planetoids? What if interstellar space had a light sprinkling of things like Oumuamua? On an interstellar scale, maybe this could create the lensing effects and explain some other phenomena. Is it unreasonable that 5/6 of the mass of the universe is like the stuff that makes up planets, but isn't lit up as brightly as a star?