Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't make any sense at all unless they simultaneously believe that DM is actually the right answer.
I’m sorry, I can see where I was ambiguous. I meant I can see why dark matter is appealing to more researchers in general and why MOND is in the minority. If dark matter is right, we can find it. If MOND is right, we’ve just been doing incomplete math this whole time. One of those is way more exciting.
Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is correct. The orbital precession occurs even for a point mass.
Former physicist myself: Not sure I understand your (and parents) argument. Given the Suns gravitational field, and the orbit that Mercurius has, the speed of the planet can be determined. So the argument that a point mass would have the same precession does not dispute the argument that it is the relativistic mass of the point mass/planet that determines the precession. I will not venture into arguments* whether gra…
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
And since readers may find this interesting: The various writeups all say that relativity explained the precession of Mercury's orbit, but they never say exactly what factor was accounted for by relativity. The answer: Mercury is heavier when it is at perihelion in its elliptical orbit, because it's moving faster. The increased relativistic mass makes for increased momentum at perihelion, which carries the planet a l…
That doesn't sound right. Relativistic mass as a concept is avoided in modern physics because it doesn't yield much insight and is hard to keep consistent. Involving gravity only makes it worse, because it's very hard to consistently include gravity in special relativity. For one, does the relativistic mass gravitate or not? And if you actually do go through the calculations, you find that you do not get the observed…
There are scattered typos, but it's an excellent annotated bibliography. I was unaware of some of the 21st century papers it lists.
A small thing, and it could just be me. I'm not sure where McDonald is going with respect to his point in footnote 7 about his reference [54] (Einstein 1911, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.1911340... (German), https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol3-trans/393 (English)) and unfortunately his ...kirkmcd.princeton.edu/examples/GR/... links all want passwords. It's obvious that the footnote is about §2 of [54], but to me it does not really engage with the \gamma m in the text referring to footnote 7 (or indeed the content of your own comment's parent comment). Instead the (spring-balance-indicated, i.e. "contact"[1]) change of weight when light is beamed from one weighed system to another is diagnostic, with the focus of thought being on how that beamed light is adapted when acceleration or gravitation is relevant. This is further developed into gravitational redshift in [54]§3 (which, frankly, is an amazing bit of Einstein's early thinking). So I don't see how footnote 7 fits the perihelion precession topic, where the (rest) masses are defined as constant and radiation pressure is ignored.
[The sodium quasi-cometary tail of Mercury is cool, though. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18220-2>]
[1] https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Weight/whatIs...
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
And since readers may find this interesting: The various writeups all say that relativity explained the precession of Mercury's orbit, but they never say exactly what factor was accounted for by relativity. The answer: Mercury is heavier when it is at perihelion in its elliptical orbit, because it's moving faster. The increased relativistic mass makes for increased momentum at perihelion, which carries the planet a l…
I don't think there's a way to meaningfully connect your comment to general relativity (GR). "The answer" in GR is that Mercury is in geodesic motion ("free fall"), with its geodesic picked out by the mass of the solar system and principally its central mass (the sun). For all practical purposes, nothing about Mercury itself selects which geodesic its on. The weak equivalence principle (WEP) says that in curved space…
Obvious editing errors in the last paragraph - fixes italicized: "If Earth has an order of magnitude smaller perihelion precession ... Earth's orbit". The first fix was meant to echo the parent's wording:
"And the effect exists and is known for the other
planets now; the mass increase is proportional to
velocity-squared and the velocity difference depends
on the eccentricity of the orbit, so it's an order of
magnitude smaller for Earth, but still measurable and
now known"
With regard to that, here is a table of exactly and approximately solved perihelion advances of all eight planets and Pluto: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9635960/table/t...>. [Sourced from an interesting (but as yet uncited, and weirdly published in TSWJ which let through some minor typos like "elliptik") paper in the category of "the expansion of the universe does not affect solar system orbits": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9635960/> [*]].Worth noting that Mars's orbit is highly eccentric at 0.0934, and its eccentricity is growing (as is Mercury's). Venus's orbit is much less eccentric at 0.0068. (Greater precision and eccentricities of the other planets can be found at https://calgary.rasc.ca/orbits.htm>).
[*] Taking the geometric mean across significantly different calculated values of the cosmological constant using their method (which I have no problem with) is to me a mathematical trick too far. That averaging does arrive at the conventional order of magnitude of \Lambda in m^-s, but I wonder if that's coincidence. The first author is essentially a mathematician https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9343-6062>, and whether the metric for the solar system must have a \Lambda term is much more a physical argument.
On that front, perhaps the authors should have cited another Iorio paper along with their [10], namely "Can solar system observations tell us something about the cosmological constant?" (2006) https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...> although tbf Iorio cites his earlier and more popular paper in [10].
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#145Milgrom's theory has a problem. There's no theoretical basis for it. It arises from observations, but nobody can say why or how it fits in cosmology.
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t it still be passing in front of something, or is it likely to be comparatively ‘stationary’ against a similarly stationary backdrop of stars and other objects?
When a star is occluded by a planet, it'll dip in brightness at a pretty regular interval (because of the orbit). So you can look look for a series of dips, which gives you a candidate. That's then looked at more closely. Since a planet 9 wouldn't transit a star at any regular interval, it wouldn't show up as a candidate for that search technique.
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#147Whenever I read about Planet Nine search, I have a very naive (as a non-physicist) childish question: if we detect anomaly in our Solar System just less than a decade ago and can’t find anything visual which explains it, assuming there is giant planet/piece of ice floating somewhere at the edge of Solar System, how we are sure that there are not a lot of such objects and real space is not as “empty” as we think it is…
The simple answer is that there are actually very large numbers of objects in the space between stars that aren't detectable. Including, certainly, planet-sized objects that formed in stellar environments, escaped, and now fly freely in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are measurements, not parameters. Just like the exact baryonic matter distribution is not a parameter of GR. You have an initial matter distribution, which is a random sample of a probability distribution (that is a part of the model) and then it starts clumping together over time.
They're not measurements. The measurements are rotation rates at various distances from the galactic center, then you plug that into a model and the model tells you where the DM is in that galaxy, then you say "DM explains it all for this galaxy!", but no, the amount and distribution of the DM is an output of the model and that cannot prove anything. There is never an explanation for why DM amounts and distribution v…
> "DM theory needs to make predictions we can then test"
That is what scientists do: Start from the hypothesis of a dark matter dominated universe, from the beginning (or soon after the big bang), then turn on time and physics (gravity plus gas physics in a computer simulation), and galaxies form as gravity causes matter to clump together. The properties of those theoretical galaxies are testable predictions.
Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#149Re: Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not measurements. The measurements are rotation rates at various distances from the galactic center, then you plug that into a model and the model tells you where the DM is in that galaxy, then you say "DM explains it all for this galaxy!", but no, the amount and distribution of the DM is an output of the model and that cannot prove anything. There is never an explanation for why DM amounts and distribution v…
What you are calling a model is simply a way of quantifying a measurement of a galaxy to describe (or model) its mass distribution. There is no physics involved. > "DM theory needs to make predictions we can then test" That is what scientists do: Start from the hypothesis of a dark matter dominated universe, from the beginning (or soon after the big bang), then turn on time and physics (gravity plus gas physics in a…
Even so, there are predictions low-parameter DM models seemingly can't make, like: what percentage of galaxies have zero dark matter?