Pretty sure things have actually been going the opposite way and we’ve only found more and more evidence that it’s a real thing that is there, rather than finding anything that challenges that
Comment on Hubble telescope discovers rare galaxy that is 99% dark matter
MetalSlugX@piefed.social 22 hours ago
I take this to be a nail in dark matter’s coffin. The more I learn about it, the more it seems an outrageous placeholder for failing to correctly model and describe gravity. We’ve searched… fuck all has come out of collider research, etc. I can’t believe anymore there is a “particle”.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
MetalSlugX@piefed.social 21 hours ago
Right, but real thing or effect <> dark matter
We’ve found absolutely ZERO evidence, only peculiarities with observations which point to bad models and DM is the fill in. The more we look, the less likely it seems to be as described.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
We’ve found absolutely ZERO evidence
Well that’s completely untrue. There’s loads of observational evidence in many many many different contexts that all very strongly support the existence of dark matter.
which point to bad models and DM is the fill in.
So there’s not really any real faction in cosmology that denies the existence of dark matter. The most skeptical of scientists are generally only proposing minor tweaks of the models, and those still require the existence of dark matter. Do you actually know of any credible cosmologist that claims that dark matter does not actually exist?
And like, yeah, of course we know the models aren’t 100%, we still have more science to do and likely always will.
Plus, the measure of scientific models is usefulness, not 100% “corectness”. There are loads of old, outdated cosmology models that we know are “wrong” and yet still use literally all the time today, because they’re really great at matching observations within specific conditions and constraints, which makes them very useful and valuable within those constraints. We just don’t use them outside of those constraints where we know they break down.
The more we look, the less likely it seems to be as described.
Again, this is absolutely false. The more we look, the stronger the evidence we find to support dark matter.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 18 hours ago
“Dark matter” is not its own idea. It is literally the name for the unknown observed effect, NOT an explanation for the effect.
Most physicists hate the term “dark matter” too, because it sounds like an explanation when it is literally the opposite.
“Dark matter” could be one or several things at once, because it is the name for the observed phenominon, not an explanation for it.
kichae@wanderingadventure.party 12 hours ago
LurkingLuddite Yeah, it’s kind of wild that this discussion is happening on this post in particular. This is a galaxy that has multiple times more extreme gravity than other galaxies, and someone wants to use that finding as a reason to sell the idea that dark matter isn’t stuff?
If it were a modling issue, then wwe’d see this everywhere. This is the opposite of evidence against dark matter.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 4 hours ago
The sucky thing is, it could be a modeling issue, but the answer would have to be a model that agrees with all observations. For example, it could be that spacetime can get permanently warped such that gravity-like effects remain, but then how would a model represent that? If the model represents it as a field that is held in effect by some localized particle, then that ‘something’ might still be called “matter” even though it could be nothing more than an artifact of that particular model.
For a similar happenstance with current models, see the “graviton”. If spacetime ‘changes’ due to the presence of matter (at least, insofar as locality and position itself is real) and nothing more, there might not actually be a graviton to discover, yet that’s what the models demand to become closer to observed reality.