What we know is that general relativity fails to explain gravitational interactions at very large scales for the matter we can see in telescopes.
The simplest answer for this conundrum is that there is extra matter that we can’t see in telescopes - aka it is ‘dark’ matter. This substance doesn’t appear to interact at all outside of gravity - which is a property we haven’t observed anywhere else. Further, in order to explain the motions we see, it would have to outweigh all the visible matter in the universe by a factor of 5, which seems to strain credibility given that - again - we have never seen anything like it.
Another answer for the observations is we are wrong about gravity, that it behaves differently at very large scales. This doesn’t require a massive amount of invisible magic substance conveniently spread throughout the universe, but to date no theory has been able to explain all the strange observations - and Dark Matter remains the moderate consensus view.
This doesn’t mean dark matter absolutely exists, it is just a hole in our current understanding. We’ve been looking for it for nearly a century and have yet to find direct evidence. In fact, there isn’t even one theory of Dark Matter because it also has difficulty explaining every available observation.
In summary: we have mountains and mountains of evidence that our current theory of gravity fail to explain the big stuff, we have exceedingly little evidence as to what the disconnect with reality is.
The tone of your messages come off as a bit confrontational, that’s probably the reason sorry!
Anyway, like many other situations before, there is probably no single fix to dark matter.
There’s probably a huge swath of cold hydrogen that still goes undetected that would explain part of the small scale stuff (bullet cluster and such), and then some quantum gravity or modified gravity to explain the very low range stuff.
Also, there are papers out there about how large scale simulations assume smooth distribution of matter, but then when computing with the actual distribution of matter, the some dark matter phenomenons tend to disappear.
Anyhow, exiting stuff to get new physics to learn about!
![References: [1] out of his ass](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/7d954d56-4739-4230-b641-f7a2ed05fa5c.jpeg){kind=link}
What we know is that general relativity fails to explain gravitational interactions at very large scales for the matter we can see in telescopes.
The simplest answer for this conundrum is that there is extra matter that we can’t see in telescopes - aka it is ‘dark’ matter. This substance doesn’t appear to interact at all outside of gravity - which is a property we haven’t observed anywhere else. Further, in order to explain the motions we see, it would have to outweigh all the visible matter in the universe by a factor of 5, which seems to strain credibility given that - again - we have never seen anything like it.
Another answer for the observations is we are wrong about gravity, that it behaves differently at very large scales. This doesn’t require a massive amount of invisible magic substance conveniently spread throughout the universe, but to date no theory has been able to explain all the strange observations - and Dark Matter remains the moderate consensus view.
This doesn’t mean dark matter absolutely exists, it is just a hole in our current understanding. We’ve been looking for it for nearly a century and have yet to find direct evidence. In fact, there isn’t even one theory of Dark Matter because it also has difficulty explaining every available observation.
In summary: we have mountains and mountains of evidence that our current theory of gravity fail to explain the big stuff, we have exceedingly little evidence as to what the disconnect with reality is.
Yeah, I’m not sure why I’m getting so much flack from people. This is pretty much all I was saying.
The tone of your messages come off as a bit confrontational, that’s probably the reason sorry!
Anyway, like many other situations before, there is probably no single fix to dark matter.
There’s probably a huge swath of cold hydrogen that still goes undetected that would explain part of the small scale stuff (bullet cluster and such), and then some quantum gravity or modified gravity to explain the very low range stuff.
Also, there are papers out there about how large scale simulations assume smooth distribution of matter, but then when computing with the actual distribution of matter, the some dark matter phenomenons tend to disappear.
Anyhow, exiting stuff to get new physics to learn about!