Gigantic pillars of Big Bang are creaking and starting to collapse like colossal dominoes. These are tumultuous times in Cosmology.
The voice you hear getting louder is Brünnhilde practicing Götterdämmerung in describing the fruitless and essentially completed search for a scattershot conjecture called “Dark Matter.” What a contrast with a mere five years ago when Dark Matter was expected to be found rapidly. A research group from University of Chile led by Moni Bidin looked carefully at the historical motions of some 400 nearby stars (up to 13,000 light years away) and found zero evidence that their motions are influenced in any way that could be attributed to the idea called Dark Matter.
Meanwhile a Russian researcher, Igor Karachentsev, looked at eleven thousand nearby galaxies to see where Dark Matter might be found around our galaxy (“Missing Dark Matter in the Local Universe“) – again finding nothing.
So if the Dark Matter conjecture is headed for the showers, then what’s going on with galaxy rotation curves? Though the mainstream science media never reported it, in 2008, two researchers (James Feng and Charles Gallo) recalculated the galaxy mass distribution vs spin and found – Gasp! that there was no problem explaining galaxy rotation curves with with ordinary Newtonian gravity and dynamics using only known visible matter.
Charles Gallo said — “We have shown that Galactic Rotation data can be described with Newtonian Gravity and Newtonian Dynamics without ‘Massive Peripheral Spherical Halos of Mysterious Dark Matter around Rotating Disk Galaxies’ and without MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics).”
“Our studies only obviate the need for the standard unjustified concept of ‘Massive Peripheral Spherical Halos of Mysterious Dark Matter around Rotating Disk Galaxies’.”
So Dark Matter is simply not needed to explain galaxy rotations. Plain-vanilla ordinary gravity is all that is going on. Dark Matter — R.I.P. ?
Nearby dark-matter-free zone poses cosmic conundrum, by Lisa Grossman, 20 April 2012 (It includes a video of where the dark matter would appear if it were visible (and if it existed).)
“Kinematical and chemical vertical structure of the Galactic thick disk II. A lack of dark matter in the solar neighborhood” Moni Bidin et al: arxiv.org/abs/1204.3924 (Astrophysical Journal, in press);
“Missing Dark Matter in the Local Universe” I. Karachentsev, Astrophysical Bulletin, in press, arxiv.org/abs/1204.3377
“The dark matter crisis: falsification of the current standard model of cosmology” Pavel Kroupa, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (in press) arxiv.org/abs/1204.2546
List of other Dark Matter Problems:
“Problems Created by the Dark Matter Hypothesis”
Normal Newtonian Gravity and Dyanmics are Adequate (“No Dark Matter Needed”) Papers —
“Modeling the Newtonian Dynamics for Rotation Curve Analysis of Thin-Disk Galaxies, Feng and Gallo, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics 11 (2011) 1429-1448, www.raa-journal.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3236
“A Thin-Disk Gravitational Model for Galactic Rotation” By Gallo and Feng, Astronomical Society of Pacific Conference Proceedings, vol 413, p 289-303, Dec 2009, CCC2 Conference in Port Angeles, Sept 2008.
“Galactic Rotation Described by a Thin-Disk Gravitational Model Without Dark Matter” C. F. Gallo and James Q. Feng, Superconix Inc, MN. USA., Journal of Cosmology, April 2010, Vol 6, 1373-1380. (Paper #4)
David Dilworth:
Dark Matter R.I.P.? No way!
If we are to get rid of the Big Bang and the Expanding Universe we’ve got to at least make an effort. I need a well behaved Dark Mass to generate the Cosmological Redshift for a non-Expanding Universe.
And how do you explain the results that Fred Zwicky and Vera Rubin (and others, I’m sure) with their very accurate galaxy rates-of-rotation speed measurements?
I suggest that one should view with great suspicion when the computers used in the studies had fed into them the parameters of a Universe they believed to be: an Expanding Universe, with all its warts. Could this not bias them just a bit?
In my paper, I conjured up an Energy with mass, a mass which could be a candidate for the Dark Mass which, then, would do its appointed tasks, which include filling the whole of Existence.
I also firmly believe that the electro-magnetic waves need a mass to ride upon, as do magnetic fields. Remember that this Dark Mass (our vacuum?) has the characteristics of permeability and permittivity.
The Dark Mass (Matter), especially if it is intrinsically negative as I suggested, does these jobs so well!
Jim Wright
Thank you for your thoughtful note Jim.
You ask what could be wrong with the very accurate galaxy rates-of-rotation speed measurements by Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin.
Well, accuracy does not necessarily mean correct or meaningful . . .
and
Galaxy rotation curves do not necessarily mean mass is missing – as Feng and Gallo have shown.
The term “Dark matter” was invented(1) by the creative Fritz Zwicky who calculated the gravitational mass of the Coma cluster of more than 1,000 galaxies using the Virial Theorem (that there is a relationship between a spiral galaxy’s mass, radius, rotational velocity and observed surface brightness).
The answer showed 400 times more luminosity than expected from the Coma cluster. This meant to him that most of the matter was invisible – dark matter.
While it was a reasonable idea at the time, the problem is that the method used, the Virial Theorem, has subsequently developed a serious conflict with the fairly strongly verified (and much simpler) Tully Fisher relation (a relationship between a spiral galaxy’s maximum rotational velocity and luminosity (absolute magnitude).
Use of the Virial Theorum leads to the conclusion that the amount of Dark Matter in a galaxy is correlated with the galaxy’s Surface Brightness independent of the luminous mass ! — which is inherently false by definition.
For more information see “Disk-Halo Conspiracy.”
Idea Replacement
When a complex idea is contradicted by a more direct idea which stands up to good observations I believe it is time to demote the weaker complex idea.
I’m sorry if this may make your cosmology idea more difficult, but added to the above, the Dark Matter hypothesis has a serious and growing laundry list of problems.
Personally I’m excited about the Feng and Gallo work (references are in the article above) showing how normal Newtonian gravity and dynamics can explain galaxy rotation curves. I hope to carefully review them soon.
Notes:
Zwicky did not create the Dark Matter idea from a vacuum. Jan Oort wrote in 1932 that he found a discrepancy between the mass of stars in our Milky Way, their motion and their luminosity.
Later Louise Volders and Vera Rubin did the pioneering work on galaxy rotations curves finding a discrepancy called the galaxy rotation problem.
In my response to your “Cosmology Hypotheses Invited” I use the Dark Mass as a means of generating the Cosmological Redshift without an Expanding Universe, a redshift that is compounded as the wave travels from its source to the Viewer, just as we see it. The Expanding Universe must go. How else?
The “cosmological redshifts” do not give a valuable scale of distances because the redshifts result from a (thermodynamical allowed) exchange of energy between light beams propagating in atomic hydrogen excited to 2S or 2P states (or more). Such frequency shifts are observed in labs using femtosecond light pulses (ISRS: Impulsive Stimulated Raman Scattering). These shifts may be explained replacing in the theory of refraction the coherent Rayleigh scatterings by Raman scatterings (using the 3 quadrupolar resonances in the cited states). This is ORDINARY SPECTROSCOPY. The computations show that these shifts require, with ordinary INCOHERENT light a low pressure , a long path. The experiment was done (by chance) using excited atomic hydrogen resulting from the adiabatic expansion of the solar wind between 15 AU and 20 AU. In this region, energy is transferred from the solar light to the radio waves exchanged between far probes (Pioneer 10…) and the Earth. Thermodynamics says that these radiowaves get energy, are blue-shifted. A wrong explanation is a Doppler effect, an anomalous acceleration, MOND, and so on…
I found the Feng and Gallo reference particularly useful – it seems in keeping with the similar work of Kenneth Nicholson on the galactic rotation problem. I was surprised in reading their work that this understanding has been around since the mid-90’s and has been largely ignored. I will try to spread the word about it – I have added references to it in a timeline articleThe 100 year wrong turn in cosmology.
About the comments by Jacques Moret-Bailly – do you think it is possible that the mechanism of frequency shift that he describes might explain redshift in general? Is this like a tired light mechanism?
Recently came upon your website and am writing to say that I really enjoy it. The post on the cosmic microwave radiation surprise was excellent. With all the recent nonsense about the big bang in the media, it was good to read something that made sense. Thanks for keeping the website free from jargon and math. Keep up the good work! John Schraufnagel
Thank you John.
Glad you enjoy and appreciate this work.