# Tag Info

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Hot dark matter would be made from very light, fast moving particles. Such particles could not possibly be gravitationally bound to any structure, but rather would be dispersed all across the universe. But dark matter is always "found" (or "inferred") either gravitationally bound to some visible structure (e.g. weak lensing detection of dark matter ...

14

Some additions to the answer of MBR: In fact, we do not know that dark matter and dark energy do exist, but we have indirect clues. You will often see claims that dark matter and dark energy are two of the major problems of cosmology today, including by professional astronomers, but this is an epistemological misconception: you cannot call a hypothesis a ...

11

First of all I'll start with a few ideas: Baryonic Matter: Baryons are elementary particles made up of 3 quarks. This includes protons and neutrons, and the term baryonic matter refers to matter made of baryons, such as atoms. Examples of non-baryonic matter includes neutrinos, free electrons and other exotic matter. Things like planets, stars, dust, etc. ...

10

Dark matter and dark energy are two different things, accounting for different observations. Dark matter: Dark matter is needed to explain, among other things, the rotation curve of galaxies. One could expect these rotation curves to decrease at large radii (because one should expect keplerian rotation for galaxies), and it is not the case, the rotation ...

8

Dark Matter Your understanding of dark matter isn't bad, but here's a few clarifying details. Orbits: The speed of an object's orbit is related to 2 things: the radius of its orbit and the mass inside of it. In the solar system, over 99% of the mass is concentrated at the centre, so radius is the dominant effect on orbital speed. As we look at planets ...

7

There are certainly people who study alternative (non-General Relativistic) theories of gravity. The most popular theories have so far been: Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) - which essentially postulates that Newtonian Mechanics break down on some scale, leading to the rotation curves we see in galaxies. Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS) - this is a ...

7

Dark matter, is just a name for something we know nothing of. It was named to account for an extra gravity source for which there have been indirect observations, but yet we cannot explain. The force of gravity exerted by light is negligibly small yet we have measured the gravitational pull of Dark Matter to be big enough to affect whole galaxies; it is ...

6

What I ask myself is: Couldn't there be "negative" bundles of mass just the other way that pushes matter away instead of invisible dark matter that pulls it? The galaxy rotation curve indicates a (positively massed) dark matter distribution that is close to spherically symmetric; cf. dark matter halo. I take it that you are asking whether instead of ...

6

You don't have to guesstimate to come up with the answer. What you do is look at the dynamics of stars with respect to the Galactic plane - in particular, the velocity dispersions of stars with known distances from the plane, combined with a reasonable assessment of where the Sun is with respect to the plane (close), yields an almost model-independent ...

5

The current supernova is a supernova of type Ia. Supernovae of type Ia are used as standard candles for distance estimates, especially used to determine the Hubble constant. Hence by a better calibration of this kind of supernovae, more about the reliability and accuracy of distance estimates can be learned. The expansion rate (in relation to the distance) ...

5

When you say "particle" candidates, I assume you're excluding MACHOs and RAMBOs. MACHOs are "dark" objects at the stellar scale like black holes, neutron stars, brown dwarfs, etc. RAMBOs are clusters of similar dark objects. MACHOs and RAMBOs are made of primarily baryonic matter (everyday stuff like protons and neutrons — electrons are not baryons but ...

5

The question seems to be based on some misconceptions, so I'll try to clear them up. Dark matter is not the same as dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy are two completely separate and unrelated concepts. It's unfortunate that many articles trying to entice readers with tales of the unexplored frontiers of astronomy tend to use the phrase "dark matter ...

4

This is a bit of a speculative question, but I can answer it. Dark matter has been observed in galaxies, and the distributions of dark matter in galaxies have also been measured. It seems clear that the matter is firmly in our universe - we just can't detect it with electromagnetic radiation. *However, there are ideas (extremely speculative) that dark ...

4

I don't see any reason why dark matter couldn't be considered a medium just as air or water are, but this does not mean that your conclusion is correct. Dark matter does not interact with photons, however the reason we know dark matter exists is because of the measurable effect of its gravity. Galaxies have a tendency to clump around it. Light travels ...

4

We can't. That is an over simplification only used in elementary treatments simply to provide the the flavour of the argument. If you see it done somewhere in the refereed literature, it is probably incorrect. Of course it may be true that the mass is almost spherically symmetric, especially if it is dominated by a spherically symmetric dark matter ...

4

The cause for the oscillations perpendicular to the galactic plane is the gravity of the non-spherical mass distribution (needed for a plane Kepler ellipse) in the Milky Way. Simplified, there is a dense galactic plane. The density is not exactly known; therefore there is some uncertainty (a few million years) about the precise oscillation period. Details ...

4

You cannot have dark without light. Not true in the case of dark matter (for the general case, see below). Dark matter is called "dark" because it appears that it doesn't absorb or emit electromagnetic radiation - light! It can interact with light via gravitational lensing, but dark matter particles have no electromagnetic charge (we think) and so are ...

4

Is it the paper David H pointed out, by Geringer-Sameth et al. (2015)? If so, then I should point out that they're not the first. Just using Wikipedia, I came across Weniger (2012) and Albert et al. (2008). Geringer-Sameth et al.'s abstract reads (in part) We present a search for gamma-ray emission from the direction of the newly discovered dwarf galaxy ...

3

As Yashbhatt said, we can detect light: with our eyes (visible light only) and with special machines. We can also see the effects of some type of lights. Dark matter, however, cannot be detected for now. Also, light is energy, dark matter is matter. Why does your skin tan? It's because of the ultraviolet light. Why are you hot each summer? It's because of ...

3

Another thing about dark energy/matter: People have a pretty good idea that dark energy exist because, when you chart the expansion of two objects in the universe over time, from its origin, there is a bell curve. Basically, the speed of the universe's expansion started out faster, than slowed down, and recently (or at least relatively), the expansion has ...

3

Two reasons. We know from looking at galaxy rotation curves and the motion of galaxies in clusters and from gravitational lensing, that the amount of "dark matter" is some 30% of the density of the universe. But on the other hand, estimates of the abundances of deuterium, helium, tritium and lithium produced in the big bang indicate that only 5% of the ...

3

Well, there are microlensing experiments, the results of which have largely removed MACHOs as a significant source of Dark Matter. The background field of stars is usually a nearby galaxy (a Magellanic cloud one or Andromeda, say), or the galactic bulge, and the experiment looks for lensing objects between us and there. In particular, they're pretty much ...

3

Matter is the stuff you are made of. Antimatter is the same as matter in every way, looks the same, behaves the same, except its particles have electrical charges opposite to matter. E.g., our electrons are negatively charged, whereas a positron (an antimatter "electron") is positively charged. The positron is the "anti-particle" of the electron. When a ...

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Yes, as mentioned elsewhere, it is possibly possible. Dark matter particles may be intrinsically unstable (though having long lifetimes, which are at least significantly longer than Hubble time). Check for more info here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6434

2

There are several types of supernova and ways that the core can collapse. Lets take an extreme case in which gamma-ray photodisintegration destroys all of the heavy elements (Si, Fe and Ni, etc) and breaks them all up into protons, neutrons and electrons. Each nucleus releases all of its binding energy, about 9 MeV per nucleon mass or 0.9% of the rest ...

2

The most favoured WIMPS at the moment are probably neutralinos, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralino These particles are purely hypothetical at the moment. The mass estimates in the above Wikipedia article for the lightest neutralino range between 10 and 10,000 GeV, meaning that the production rates in SNs will be much lower than with an assumed 1 ...

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Ultra-high energetic cosmic rays are thought to be caused by black holes as one option. Those energies should be sufficient for the formation of (hypothetical) heavy supersymmetric particles, which should decay to stable (hypothetical) neutralinos, candidates for (hypothetical) WIMPS. Assuming this theoretical framework, black holes (or similar dense ...

2

Light may account for a small portion of dark matter, but it is unlikely to account for most/all of it. From a Wikipedia article on dark matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter the total mass–energy of the known universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy.[2][3] Thus, dark matter is estimated to constitute ...

2

No, the galactic magnetic field is very weak, about 0.1nT. It is able to bend the trajectory of highly-energetic charged particles and also to align dust grains across the magnetic field. However, is too weak to affect the rotation of a galaxy. Although the origin of galactic magnetic field is not clear yet, the supermassive black holes do not ...

2

Very roughly: $3.5 \times 10^{33}kg$, or 1800 solar masses. Here's how I came by that number, it is a very rough approximation. The major mass components of the galaxy are stars, the interstellar medium, and dark matter. According to the HYG Database there are approximately 1000 stars within 50 light years of the Earth. The average mass of a star is ...

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