Dark matter recognized?

[besilarius]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149742-half-the-universes-missing-matter-has-just-been-finally-found/#.Wdu9BIeDT_I.facebook

Little more info would be nice.

[Nefaro]

Half?

They still have quite a bit more to discover, then.  :)

[JasonPratt]

That probably isn't going to happen: http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles-1.22970#/b1

It's important to understand that, conceptually, dark matter, and dark energy, despite their exotic comic-book applications in fiction, aren't necessarily some type of exotic matter and energy. They're more like remainders left over in an equation pointing to material and energy that hasn't been found and accounted for yet.

But the reigning paradigm in astrophysics has kind of wanted and needed for dark energy, and also dark matter, to be something exotic. This is why experts seemed disappointed when half the "dark matter" expected in the universe turned out to be a weather balloon instead of a flying saucer, so to speak. It's a Unidentified Flying Object either way (so to speak), until it's identified -- but it makes quite a lot of conceptual difference whether the Object turns out to be swamp gas or the Millennium Falcon. And what the current paradigm needed, so to speak, was the Falcon as an explanation in order to account for observed behaviors. (I mean they were looking for something categorically other, and more exotic, than already-discovered baryon particles; what they found was a bunch of previously undetected baryon particles.)

Anyway, dark matter and dark energy theories aren't dead exactly, but the exotic theory types are turning up dead. Consequently, we're going to see some rechecking of the original theories which seemed to require so vastly much more currently-undetectable 'dark' matter and 'dark' energy as a factor, to see if mistakes were made in the reasoning; and we're going to see new theories (already running for about a year now) which don't need so vastly much undetected matter/energy in the universe (this is where electric universe theories are going to take a boost, for example -- a theory set where electromagnetism, not gravity, is treated as the most powerful cohesive force in astrophysics, which has the advantage of being certainly true at less than macro-size levels); and I expect we'll see new theories proposing even more exotic forms of dark matter/energy. (e.g. from the article, "Perhaps dark matter consists of exotic axion particles, which are akin to strange, massive photons. Theorists are also looking at whether dark matter might not interact with known particles at all, but exist in a "hidden sector", he says.")

Personally, I would think zero-point energy should be considered for the dark energy side of the theories, but I can understand that zero-point energy wouldn't seem(?) to provide the gravitational mass needed for current theories to validly work. But then, if electric universe theories don't need so much missing gravitational mass...

[GDS_Starfury]

was expecting a BLM thread   

[mirth]

was expecting a BLM thread   

was expecting a thread about Uranus

[GDS_Starfury]

you're obsessed with it.

[Jarhead0331]

Wonder what gameleaper thinks...

[mirth]

you're obsessed with it.

nah. Just amazed at how many goats you can accommodate.

[Sir Slash]

Dark Matter is that stuff my wife claims I track into the house even though I wipe my feet on the door mat.