Even though wikipedia calls dark matter an hypothesis it really isn’t. Dark matter is the observation, we see the gravitational effects of something that doesn’t seems to be there, mainly galaxies spinning faster than they should and light bending around clusters of galaxies more than it would bend otherwise.
Dark matter is the observation,
It can’t be a direct observation, as “dark matter” is simply a made-up term to describe something we only have a partial understanding of. A direct observation might be particles, waves, matter, and things which exist within the framework of known science and laws of nature.
Yes, I’m only a layperson, but I think science is pretty clear about that kind of thing.
Of course it is not a direct observation, if it were it would be called something else and the conversations would never had started.
Dark matter is more like a list of problems, observations that don’t correspond with our understanding of the universe. It is dark because we can’t anything causing them, and matter because it seems to be way too little mass for the gravitation effects we see.
That sounds more or less correct to me.
My quibble with your original comment is of course, unchanged, and I’m perfectly happy confining myself to the majority science POV on dark matter.
Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
I want to hear you say that at one of the conferences/meetings of scientists I could witness live.
Some would tell you “yeah that’s obvious, we just need to look in these and those parameter spaces to find out!”
While others would tell you you are blinded by glory or whatever and cannot accept that we do not understand gravity because we think there’s mass there but really it’s just another correction term.
And some would spin off wildly into other directions…
So yes we have observed an effect and dark matter is a possible solution. But it’s not the consensus name for the effect as there are many camps which simply do not need matter (neither dark nor any other kind) as an explanation.