New Study Finds Vast Galactic Network, No Sign of Dark Matter

Just like dark matter, scientists long ago tried to come up with a void-filler in the hopes of making their numbers work out. It was called the ether and was widely accepted as the truth by even non-scientists. We base so much of our cosmology on very limited data sets from looking at filtered starlight and, at the other extreme, from traces of sub-actomic particles in colliders. Enormously elaborate theories have been developed, each creating more complex implications, to try to understand this excruciatingly limited data. Dark matter has never seemed to me to be anything more than a back-door construct to justify someone's theoretical numbers. "Look, now it adds up!"

Another reminder, if science needs it, is the famous epicycles that was a wonderfully complex explanation for the apparent movement of the planets against a starry background. This theory resolved all the data we had at the time, but like dark matter, its primary purpose was to mask our arrogance and hubris to think we had finally figured something out.

I wait to stand corrected when someone finally finds evidence of dark matter, and not just a new theory that surprisingly doesn't require its existence at all.

Maybe our formula is wrong but the error only show up at a galactic scale. In the same way the formulas that work fine at a human interaction level are not complete when working at a microscopic level.

@Filmjeff - We humans do get arrogant and try to stuff everything into our box rather than expanding the box. Time will tell if I eat my words.

Just a lay person here, but what if the extra particles we're looking for are in another universe or dimension outside our own?

Things don't look so bad w/ the equations if you stop assumming the univerise is billions of years old....and dark matter isn't nessecery anymore.....funny.

But we all know that we can't take the evidence where it leads us if we have to give up our naturalistic religious dogma. ;)

It's interesting our theories are predicated upon a relatively homogeneous Universe. We assume that the physical rules and the relative distribution of material are pretty much the same no matter where (or when) one is located in the Universe.

It was certainly weird when recently some observations seemed to indicated that the Fine-structure constant may not be so "constant" throughout the Universe. Just as it's odd now that dark matter might not be distributed as evenly as we might expect. Is it possible that our little region of the Universe could follow slightly different rules than another? Or is that completely absurd to even suggest?

Jeeze Popular Science needs to get it's act together with login which many times you view a page and your not logged in then you log in on another page and go back to that same page and it refuses time after time to allow you to comment on that page saying your not logged in! Stupid!

Anyway, dark matter is just all that stuff too far away to be visible but still it's so much stuff---the universe is soo much bigger than theorized--that even at a huge distance it exerts an enormous gravitational pull and keeps pulling the visible universe further apart.

I think devilish accountants who are good at hiding stuff in spreadsheet came up with the dark energy\dark matter theory.

Now that someone is finally doing an audit in the cosmos, the spreadsheets do not come true.lol

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

I'm not surprised at all. I don't think the crap exists either. Non interacting matter that makes up 90% of the Universe? Freakin please. And using gravitational, the original method of finding the stuff, was rediculous. Galaxy spin can be accounted for without the need for Dark Matter.

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

*gravitational lensing

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Dark matter does not exist and I can prove it. Any object spun in a confined space will create a vacuum at its poles and pressure at its equator. This is due to how the spinning objects surface area interacts with the free particles in the confined space. To upscale it, surface area = gravity and Particles = related celestial bodies. Isn't it obvious gravity will pull things close where centrifugal force is weak and centrifugal force will propel an object where gravity is weak. The only balanced shape possible is a disk. that's why everything from vortex blowers to well formed galaxies are disk shaped. our universe is just a bunch of big fruit juicers spinning pulp, in from the top and out the sides. But if it helps you cope then drink down that big glass of juice you call dark matter. I'll stick to reality.

Well, like any good experiment, it needs repeating by various other sources to validate its propose results..

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

Australian undergrad uses X-ray search to discover Universe's "missing mass" in galactic filaments: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4358/aussie-student-find-missing-mass

Here's my sci-fi explanation for dark matter/energy: It is the gravitational pollution trail left behind from faster-than-lightspeed travel. So you only have it between the solar-systems of highly-advanced civilizations who are capable of such travel. I know that WE think that faster than light is impossible, but we've thought that a lot of things were impossible (and possible) before. I'm just saying that if it were possible, your ship would leave a gravitational contrail behind it, so you'd have mass/gravity without the corresponding matter, so it would be "dark". The faster you traveled, the stronger the gravity which lingers longer. Just a fun thought.

Dark Matter: the Phlogiston of the 21st Century!

DarK Matter does not exist, period. In the APS April 2013 meeting I will present the paper A NEW MODEL WITHOUT DARK MATTER FOR THE ROTATION OF SPIRAL GALAXIES which shows that Dark Matter does not exist at all in spiral galaxies. The paper was accepted for publication and will be published in Vol. 3 (April 2013) of Frontiers in Science.

Mario E. de Souza