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A while ago, there was some conspicuous evidence that supermassive black holes didn't seem to be eating dark matter at the expected rate of 70%-30%, in fact, only 10% of the black hole mass increase could in principle be attributed to non-baryonic mass.

Was there some follow-up evidence for or against this observation? because it is 2012 and every astrophysicist that is out there seems to be happy and dandy about dark matter, despite this huge clue (together with MOND, and the negative results from CoGENT) that dark matter doesn't actually exist

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  • $\begingroup$ Almost every realistic MOND model I've seen still requires dark matter, just not as much of it. $\endgroup$ Dec 21, 2012 at 22:19

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The reason everyone believes in dark matter is WMAP and other such surveys - the CMB is much more difficult to explain without some non-baryonic mass.

Regarding your points:

1) That paper only said that, using an oversimplified model (spherical symmetry), accretion rates depend on whether the inflowing particles are relativistic. It makes no claim that the existence of dark matter would imply different black hole accretion rates from those we observe.

2) Modified gravity was a big thing some years ago, but it looses support every year. Moreover, it is an alternative theory to dark matter, and does not in any way constitute evidence against dark matter.

3) CoGENT, like all dark matter experiments (and there are dozens), is sensitive only to certain parameter-space regions, and no one experiment is thought to give the definitive word on dark matter, unless a reproducible, positive result is given.

If you want to see more direct, visual evidence that baryonic matter does not necessarily coincide with the dominant sources of gravity, modified or not, take a look at the Bullet Cluster, where the X-ray emission from the intracluster medium (which contains most of the mass of clusters by the way) clearly does not coincide with the gravitational lens map.

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I agree with Luscher that dark matter doesn't actually exist and that the inaccuracies of orbiting stars around an orbiting super massive black hole can be attributed to time dilation as proposed by Mr Fernades on TED and others.

The orbiting stars should be plotted in reference to the SMBH to see if a pattern appears as we might actually be seeing the existence of gravity waves rather than dark matter.

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