this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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There's a big debate now about whether dark matter really exists or there's a better explanation for how most of the mass of the universe seems to be unable to be perceived. Related to gravitational waves lately I believe.
Take this for what it is I'm not a scientist I just occasionally read science articles.
I think you're getting confused with dark energy. There is very little debate about dark matter--it's an observation that many many many people have made.
Dark energy is the name for whatever is causing the ~~explanation~~ expansion rate of the universe to increase. There's quite a bit of debate about whether the expansion rate even IS increasing. And the amount of increase is different according to how you try to observe it. So yeah, there's a lot of debate about whether dark energy is actually a thing, but there is very little debate on whether there's more matter than we're able to observe, something that we call dark matter but which we don't really understand. Similar names, but totally different concepts!
I thought the only observation we have of dark matter is via cosmological models.
Maybe it isn't needed to balance the books
It's an interesting idea, but it assumes that physical forces are getting WEAKER over time, and that's a pretty big assumption. It's not very parsimonious.
I'm not a subscriber to this particular theory, but I do think model error is a more plausible explanation than magical, undetectable mass.
The mass is definitely detectable--it's just not visible. And it's detectable in several different ways that all match, that's the key here. This is definitely an observation.
Dark matter is an infinite number of free variables we can place anywhere in our universe to make our current gravitational models work. Of course they match.
Can you call it an observation if the lens you are using may be faulty?
Why is dark matter given so much precedence over model error? (Particularly because we know our current model can't do things like quantum gravity)
If you use many lenses you can assure yourself that they are not all faulty in the same way. This is why we can safely say that dark matter is observed fact, because we observe it in so many different ways.
We see many datapoints gatheredbl by multiple technologies and approaches, but they all use the same cosmological model. The same lens.
Maybe lens was the wrong word. All the data gathered is interpretated using the same brain.