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Excellent question! In short, there are two logical possibilities to explain the data: There is dark matter and a cosmological constant (standard model) Gravity needs to be modified Interestingly, both possibilities have historical precedent: The discovery of Neptune (by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d’Arrest) one year after its ...

24

Why shouldn't the orbits of stars be Keplerian? The answer is simple. Keplerian orbits are predicated on a single central point mass. That assumption fails to some extent even in a solar system. It fails massively in a galaxy. A galaxy is not a point mass.

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Dark matter can be hot, warm or cold. Hot means the dark matter particles are relativistic (kinetic energy on the order of the rest mass or much higher), cold means they are not relativistic (kinetic energy much less than rest mass) and warm is in between. It is known that the total amount of dark matter in the universe must be about 5 times the ordinary ...

21

The show you watched seems to get two concepts mixed up: Supersymmetry and Dark Matter. The existence of Dark Matter is strongly hinted at by comsological and astrophysical considerations. It is the easiest explanation for several observations we make in the universe. Supersymmetry on the other hand provides a candidate particle. The lightest ...

20

Lubos Motl's answer is exactly right. Dark matter has "ordinary" gravitational properties: it attracts other matter, and it attracts itself (i.e., each dark matter particle attracts each other one, as you'd expect). But it's true that dark matter doesn't seem to have collapsed into very dense structures -- that is, things like stars and planets. Dark matter ...

19

Short answer The question is a bit ambiguous. If the question is why do star velocity increase with distance close to the galactic centre ? the answer is because their orbit encompass more mass, and this corresponds to a stronger gravity pull. If the question is why does their velocity stays constant and does not decrease at big radii, ...

19

The answer comes from the virial theorem, which can be derived from the Jeans equations, which are the equivalent of the Euler equations of fluid dynamics for collisionless particles (i.e., dark matter). Incidentally, the virial theorem is also valid for an ideal fluid. For a derivation see Mo, van den Bosch & White 2010 (or I'm sure many other texts). ...

18

There is a very precise reason why dark planets made of 'ordinary matter' (baryons - particles made up of 3 quarks) cannot be the dark matter. It turns out that the amount of baryons can be measured in two different ways in cosmology: - by measuring present-day abundances of some light elements (esp deuterium) which are very sensitive to the baryon amount, ...

18

As a general rule, zero mass particles which travel with the velocity of light are not good for dark matter, because dark matter concentrates around gravitational attractors. It has to be particles with some mass that can be at rest in order to stay around a galactic center from the beginning. In addition they have to be controlled by weak interactions, if ...

18

No. There is no void left by the lack of an aether. The very notion of aether should serve as a warning as to how catastrophically analogical reasoning can fail. "Water waves are in water, sound waves are in air, therefore there must be something in which light propagates." This is flawed logic, and decades of physics were arguably hindered by adhering to ...

18

We don't know. Though there are several ideas what dark matter could be, e.g. the humorously abbreviated WIMPs, all we know about dark matter is that is it massive (by light deflection, etc., etc.) and that it does not interact electromagnetically, and probably also not with the strong force. Other than that, there is no sufficently tested theory of dark ...

16

Definitely see the comments on your question. But a very brief outline of the data: Rotation-curves and galaxy-cluster mass measurements show the detailed distribution of matter in those objects, the amount of mass far exceeds the observed mass ---> most mass is non-observed Gravitational-lensing searches show that the "dark-matter" constituents must be ...

15

Well, like anything else that comes in from distant parts it's going out again without a either a three-body momentum transfer or some kind of a non-gravitational interaction. If you assume a weakly interacting form of dark matter, then I think the answer has to be yes, but the rate is presumably throttled by the weak interaction cross-section of your ...

15

The proposal in that article is that the Higgs boson is ~70GeV and stable. Since the article was written, it has been discovered that the Higgs boson is ~126GeV and decays. The hypothesis has been disproven.

14

I think the problem with matter that only interacts gravitationally is that it's hard to get it all to stay in one place. Nebula slowly form stars and planets in part because of collisions between particles lead to larger particles, which tend to attract further particles. But particles that just wizz right through each-other can't coalesce without violating ...

14

While it is possible that gravity still needs to be modified, it is looking increasingly unlikely that there ISN'T some form of dark matter. In particular, the observation of the bullet cluster is a tall order for the various modified gravity theories (though, arguably, the extra fields in something like bimetric gravity or TeVeS could be self-coupling in a ...

14

No one has discovered it. Dark matter is a proposed explanation to some observed phenomena. In particular, Galaxies rotate at a speed that implies they are quite heavy, especially towards the outer edges - but when we look at the mass from stars and interstellar gas, there isn't enough to make them spin the way they do. Gravitational lensing is a ...

13

Dark matter would affect planetary motion, but the influence of dark matter on planets in our solar system is too small to detect even currenlty, due to the low concentration of dark matter compare to ordinary matter in our solar system. See Constraints on Dark Matter in the Solar System. The density of dark matter is very low, $<~10^{-19} grams/cm^3$, ...

13

(edited version. My thanks to Rob for clearing up my misunderstandings) As dmckee writes, weak interactions between DM particles and baryons are necessary to capture dark matter, otherwise particles that enter the solar system would simply move through it and eventually leave it again. More specifically, the local rms velocity of DM particles is commonly ...

12

Note first that there are three different sources of gravitational potential: the disk, the bulge, and the dark halo. There are a few different models of the gravitational field of the disk, two of the more common potentials are: Kuzmin model: $$\Phi(r,z)=-\frac{GM}{\sqrt{r^2+(a+|z|)^2}}$$ Miyamoto-Nagai model: ...

12

There are many problems with this line of reasoning. The most common galaxy types are elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, and there might be a parallel with star systems, where the most common types are systems with a single star, and binary systems with two stars in the middle. There is simply no justification for this. The dynamics of stellar ...

12

I am an experimental physicists, and the model in the first paper has not reached the level of experimental predictions, for LHC results. In fact except for the link you give the search at the CERN document server gives nothing, and the word "weakton" does not yield discussions or appraisals. So the experimental physics community is overlooking this, even ...

12

A Goldstone boson is a generic type of particle formed when symmetries are spontaneously broken. If you want to suggest that dark matter is a Goldstone boson then that says very little unless you suggest a specific model with a symmetry to be broken. When exact symmetries are broken you get a massless Goldstone boson (except in a few special circustances, ...

11

The dark matter energy density of the universe is, at present, thought to be about five times that of the baryonic matter energy density. Meanwhile, the radiation energy density is almost negligible. Matter energy is about 4.5% of the total energy density of the universe. Dark matter makes up about 23%, and radiation is very small at about 0.009%. The number ...

11

Elliptical orbits are direct consequence of orbiting entirely outside a spherically symmetric mass. Even if you assume that a galaxy has a spherically symmetric mass distribution, the amount of mass at a radial distance less than that of the star would be changing (assuming some eccentricity). Once that happens, the orbit is no longer an ellipse.

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Even quiescent black holes tend to show up, through microlensing. Observational tests have put pretty rigorous constraints on a range of black holes masses in the Milky Way, although intergalactic black holes are not as well constrained. The other problem is figuring out how you make lots of black holes, especially at smaller scales. That's not to say that ...

11

There is a simple argument why photons emitted by stars can't be dark matter, and that's because there is about ten times more dark matter than normal matter. If all the stars created at the Big Bang had turned into photons there still wouldn't be enough of them. You might argue that maybe more normal matter than we think was created during the Big Bang, ...

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In essence, the only correct answer is, "We don't know." This is for several reasons. First of all, we don't truly know the actual extent of the universe. Because we don't know if the universe is negatively, positively, or has a flat curvature. If the universe has a negative, or flat curvature then it is indeed infinite, and Andrews answer would be ...

10

The conventional wisdom about dark matter is that it is likely to be a new kind of particle that is not part of the standard model. Basically, the reason for this is that most of the stable standard model particles interact electromagnetically (and so wouldn't be "dark"). The exception is neutrinos, and for a long time neutrino dark matter was considered ...

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