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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Astronomy
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The way I see it, Dark Matter is just a psuedonym for "Whatever is causing gravity to work differently at a galaxy scale than at a solar system scale". And further, Dark Energy is just a term for "Whatever is causing gravity to work differently at an inter-galactic scale than at a intra-galactic scale or solar system scale".
But, if we want to entertain the technical aspects of the thought, there's nothing in the definition of Matter that says it interacts with anything besides gravity (light, magnetism, etc) on its own. Just that it has mass (ie generates gravity) and cant occupy the same space as other mass. We already know via colliders that the higs bosson is the sub-particle solely responsible for Mass, way smaller than the scale of an atom. And we also know that magnetism, electric charge, and by extension light rely on electrons, which exist only at the atomic scale. So its not implausible to think that mass can exist separate from any of the things that we can detect with our other favorite methods (pretty much just different wavelengths of light) besides just the gravity they generate. In this case, gravity IS the thing we're using to detect it.
A few things not quite right here. Particles are given mass through interacting directly with the Higgs field itself. They don’t need the boson to be involved. Due to the way the math works out, the Higgs field has a non-zero value everywhere, so everything that interacts with that field is given mass by that.
Also, we know of weakly interacting matter such as neutrinos that can pass directly through other matter most of the time already. Things can be in the same place as long as the fields they’re part of don’t interact in a way that stops it.
Magnetism, electric charge, and light rely on photons, not electrons. Photons are the bosons of the electromagnetic field. Bosons are called force carriers. They get exchanged any time an electromagnetic force acts on anything. Electrons are a particle and made from the electron field. They are involved in a lot of electromagnetic interactions via photons, but not all of them.
Nothing is. Gravity works the same. We don't just infer dark matter from gravity fields. We can detect and map the exact locations of dark matter thru gravitational lensing.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubbles-dark-matter-map/