Comment on Hubble telescope discovers rare galaxy that is 99% dark matter
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 21 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 15 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 7 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.