Dark matter seems like a misunderstood component of gravity. The current explanations just seem ridiculous.
Well from what I know, gravity was once a misunderstood component of spacetime bending, so it would be proper.
Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
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Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#22Dark matter seems like a misunderstood component of gravity. The current explanations just seem ridiculous.
One more interesting explanation I read in Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell, was that dark matter is extra gravity coming from parallel universes/extra dimension. Basically, what if gravity warps not just this plane, but other realities as well. It would explain why gravity is so weak compared to other forces.
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#23This seems like something straight out of SciFi. Dark matter actually forming invisible rods that go through the Earth? Can we interact with these "hairs" if they are all around us? Can we at least detect it? It seems that all question I and any non-specialist can ask are stupid and irrelevant, but it's still so exciting to think of all the possibilities.
My vague understanding of this article is that what's being described is more like the bright "caustics" that you see when light shines through a glass of water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_%28optics%29).
The notion is that a massive object like the Earth would act something like a lens, gravitationally. That isn't usually apparent, because most types of matter and energy would simply be absorbed when they hit the Earth. But dark matter (according to our best guesses today) can pass straight through the Earth just like light through a transparent object. So if there really are "streams" of dark matter all moving the same direction passing through us, they would act analogously to light rays through an ordinary lens. (And since there could be multiple streams going different directions, it could wind up looking like several light sources shining through that glass of water, with these "hairs" or focal points extending out in several directions.)
The two questions that come to my mind after reading this brief article are, 1) does the same thing happen with, say, solar neutrinos? (Maybe they're just too fast for the effect to be meaningful?) And 2) if they're going to talk about how much more Jupiter does this focusing than the Earth does, is there a reason they didn't go all the way and talk about potentially even stronger "hairs" created by the Sun itself? (Maybe those wind up focusing inside the star?)
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#24The edge of human understanding of the universe is a vague and scary place. When we dug deep below the atom level everything we took for granted fell apart. We had to invent an entirely new model of physics to make sense of our observations, which is complex and counter-intuitive (quantum mechanics) Would it be reasonable to assume that the same applies at the opposite end of the spectrum: from the sub-atomic to the…
That is exactly which brought me to the BSM-SG model. When nothing seems to fit well and the physics appear stranger and stranger, you should ask yourself: did we do everything right ?
Did we do some mistakes in measurements ?
Do we have some some wrong assumptions ?
Turns out: yes. If you remove those wrong assumptions, you end up with a classic logical model that makes sense in very aspect. QM is just to raw for explaining the quantum world.
Things seen as fundamental particles that are huge, huge structures. Even to look only at energy and ignore form and geometry (by definition), becomes absurd with deeper understanding.
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#25The arxiv pre-print is http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.07009.pdf
Thanks! (I usually link to the arXiv abstract page rather than to the PDF: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07009 .)
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#26Dark matter seems like a misunderstood component of gravity. The current explanations just seem ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
I had some longer talk with a friend that is much more into logics about the MOND theory. The problem I have with this theory is, that I don't think that the MAX function used, is classical logic. Unfortunately, I have not found a real explanation, but we came to the standpoint, that you require some more complex logic to satisfy the MAX function and for physics, I stopped believing in anything beyond classical logic.
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#27I find this fascinating, but still purely hypothetical, yes? Basically: IF the observed expansion of the universe is indeed due to dark matter as we think of it, and IF such dark matter exist as streams, and IF such streams mix with ordinary galaxies, and IF the solar system is passing through such a stream THEN Earth MAY have dark matter filaments in its vicinity. IF we locate such a filament and send a probe, we mi…
The universe does not expand: www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf I follow the BSM-SG model in which dark matter/dark energy is absolutely clear what it is and how it functions. The illustration is even a bit similar to the BSM-SG model, if you see it as the CL dimensions. Larger astronomical bodies have their own CL space, which means they carry a bubble with them those geometry is dependent on the body itself…
The Big Bang model of cosmological history is one of the most exquisitely tested ideas in science. Just for starters, any competing model would need to duplicate the highly sensitive predictions of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis), the results of detailed simulations of structure formation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_formation), and the existence of the cosmic microwave background (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) (and at this point it would probably need to match the detailed spectrum of the CMB at least as well as inflationary models do).
That's not an impossible task, but it's an awfully high bar: the widely accepted "Lambda-CDM" model (a specific Big Bang scenario involving both dark energy and cold dark matter) and its parameters have proven to be amazingly consistent under a whole bunch of very different observational tests. The odds that it has passed all of those tests so very consistently purely by dumb luck, while the universe actually follows some entirely incompatible set of rules and history, seem vanishingly small.
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#28This seems like something straight out of SciFi. Dark matter actually forming invisible rods that go through the Earth? Can we interact with these "hairs" if they are all around us? Can we at least detect it? It seems that all question I and any non-specialist can ask are stupid and irrelevant, but it's still so exciting to think of all the possibilities.
As I understand, we can detect them through their gravitational effects and not much else. If we fully account for the pulls of all the non-dark bodies in the vicinity (Earth, Sun, Moon) and then manage to measure an anomalous gravitational pull (say on a mass connected to an extremely fine sensor) that changes with the motion of the measuring apparatus, that (I think) ought to do it. Disclaimer: not physicist.
actually, there is something that it is not really understood: the 5.9 years period of gravitational constant variation. [1]. Maybe the Earth is passing through such a filament?
[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-04-gravitational-constant-vary.htm...
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#29The edge of human understanding of the universe is a vague and scary place. When we dug deep below the atom level everything we took for granted fell apart. We had to invent an entirely new model of physics to make sense of our observations, which is complex and counter-intuitive (quantum mechanics) Would it be reasonable to assume that the same applies at the opposite end of the spectrum: from the sub-atomic to the…
Possible! There certainly is a lot that feels inelegant in the dominant model, and nobody has yet proposed a reason that so much of the universe would be so oddly invisible to us.
But (as I just noted in some detail in a different comment here) the "Lambda-CDM" model of a universe evolving in the presence of a cosmological constant and cold dark matter has proven to be quite remarkably consistent under a wide variety of very different observational tests. Everything from supernova data to the cosmic microwave background to large-scale cosmological structure/cluster formation is not just in agreement with the general outline of that model but even gives consistent (and increasingly precise) values for the parameters of the model. (They all lead to pretty much the same value for the percentage of dark matter in the universe, for example. Here's a typical graph from 2003 that I found from a Google image search: https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept09/Einasto/Figures/f... The different-colored ovals near the middle-left represent entirely different observational data.)
So I would love to learn someday that all these weird phenomena are manifestations of some deeper, more elegant truth. (I've done some limited research vaguely connected to the area myself, though that was long ago and my current focus is much less directly relevant to this topic.) But whatever that deeper truth turns out to be, we can have a whole lot of confidence that it will manifest in a way that behaves an awful lot like the dark matter and dark energy models that are being studied today.
Re: Earth Might Have Hairy Dark Matter
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Essentially the defining property of dark matter is that it does not interact electromagnetically, so there is no point to consider it.
I think you misunderstood me. I am saying the electromagnetic force can be fit the bill where we currently are trying to squeeze in "dark matter". Please be aware that we have not discovered dark matter, we don't know what its made of, its properties, or really, if it even exists. But i get it. Thinking outside of the box is frowned upon around here. Lets all be fanboys, and fuck yea downvote me some more.
I never vote someone down, maybe three or so exception - can I look that up somewhere? That aside the page you linked to contains unscientific and plainly wrong nonsense and clearly shows no understanding of physics. I totally understand that you get downvoted for that content because it does almost the equivalent of saying that air doesn't exist because I can't see it.
That being said, it must be stated first, and bluntly, that we don't think black holes exist. If not even light can get out, how is it the cores of galaxies are shooting out massive amounts of x-rays and material?