Its my opinion that there is something about the black hole at the center of these galaxies that's causing discrepancies that we attribute to "dark matter". The fact that this new galaxy is so sparse and distributed and shows no sign of dark matter seems to re-affirm this. I'd be curious to know if it even has a central black hole.
The reality is that we don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve
I'm simply saying its more likely an unknown effect of the black hole at the center. Possibly some sort of gravitational modification effect that only occures in the presents of singularities. The fact that a sparse galaxy with possible no black hole center (I assume) shows no sign of dark matter is compelling. It may not prove the specific equations/explanations set forth in MOND, but it may hint to some other alternative gravitational theory that has yet to be flushed out, rather than relying on some invisible particles which may not exist.
Black holes are weird objects, they are enormous, have huge mass and density, almost no radiation, have great gravitational effect on surroundings and they are hard to detect etc.
They seem like a perfect candidate for 'dark matter'.
Could anyone explain why it is wrong?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Baryonic_matter
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UN8jPwzj2qI/V9hRVCG1HBI/AAAAAAAAC...
It looks like Occam's razor. To explain an unexpected result, you label the problem so it looks like it must be a new entity.
What makes you so sure? I think limiting our thinking too much into the confines of regular gravitation is a mistake. Maybe SMB are the source of these theoretical heavy neutrino's we have yet to detect that are the #1 candidate for dark matter/WIMPS. Or maybe the gravitational disturbance of a singularity is far more complex that we imagine?
Take a look at the video on the Galaxy Rotation Curve video in this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve#Descript...
I stare at it and cant help but wonder is something about that central singularity is unique. We still have no idea what truly happens at the center.
If supermassive black holes do something new and strange with gravity--something big enough to affect an entire surrounding galaxy--it seems likely it should somewhat affect the trajectories of the nearest objects too.
That's not to rule out something strange about black hole gravitation, but the observations do constrain some versions of how strange things can be.
"Oh no, the existence of dark matter means the universe should be collapsing in on itself, lets invent dark energy to balance out the dark matter"
I always figured that the KISS principle meant maybe we just didn't understand gravity very well, but what the hell do I know. Always found it fascinating though.
Even if you remove dark matter from the picture, there's still the acceleration of expansion (increase of the Hubble term over time), for which there is pretty solid data, namely the discrepancy of brightness and redshift of distant supernovae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_expansion_of_the_...
By far the "cosmological constant" sort of outweighs all the other terms in the Universe's stress energy tensor.
We see redshift and infer that a pulsar or other know quantity is shifted and assume it has moved because space has expanded. Why don't we ever assume that the length of a second has shrunk in the billions of years that have gone by? Space and time change in relativity, why is only change in space considered in the history of the universe? What's wrong with time?
Gauge fixing.
There is no particular reason to slice up spacetime into spacelike hypersurfaces where each point in the hypersurface has the same time coordinate, other than convenience. Likewise, there is no particular reason to chose one set of time coordinates over another, other than convenience.
You can certainly work in 4 dimensional "block universe" when considering the radar distances between points on the worldlines that the centres-of-momentum of galaxies (or clusters) travel, and choose arbitrary coordinates. You're then using tensors for everything, and considering spacetime 4-volumes.
Slicing or threading into 3+1 resp 1+3 makes the calculations easier, but can introduce fictitious forces and other features that depend on one's choices when doing that sort of gauge fixing.
The standard cosmological frame of reference is a 3+1 slicing wherein the time coordinate is recoverable by an idealized observer locally measuring the spectrum of the CMB photons arriving at a point on the observer's worldline; such an observer will see matter in the bulk as homogeneous and isotropic, and will be far from any of the matter, and will see the CMB spectrum as equal to the emission spectrum of an ideal blackbody with a particular temperature. Add in adiabatic expansion, and the universe gives a quasi-universal time coordinate, which clamps many of the pseudo-forces 3+1 slicing can produce.
Since we are near lots of matter (the Earth, the solar system, our galaxy and the local cluster), we see big anisotropies and thus noise, including a gravitational and peculiar-motion redshift anisotropy in the CMB. As we get a better handle on our local environment, we can better strip out these factors that distinguish us real physical observers from an idealized non-physical "Eulerian" observer of a FLRW universe.
But since an alien astronomer in a far away galaxy could reasonably take the same approach, we could exchange messages like: "at our CMB temperature x K we observed a supernova in your galaxy", which the other side could relate to their measurement of the CMB temperature at time of supernova and at the time of receipt of message, and recover the equilvalent of a radar distance.
This also plays neatly with the Robertson-Walker (RW) spacetime that is fundamental to the cosmological frame: RW spacetimes readily admit a slicing which makes them higher-dimensional equivalents of a set of infinitesmially thin plates stacked one on top of the other, where the metric includes a function which determines the radius of each plate as one goes from the bottommost plate to the topmost. It also makes it easy to set down comoving coordinates such that matter stays at rest at the same spatial coordinates in every spacelike hypersurface: we expand the metric instead of actually moving the galaxies, which is good because there is no distortion of the shape of galaxy clusters implying a real (i.e., gauge-independent) acceleration in any particular direction, and because it makes it easy to take an Eulerian fluid mechanics approach to galaxy clusters in the large.
Additionally, this sort of slicing plays nicely with things like Hamiltonian mechanics and the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which we are likely to care about when thinking about the microscopic details of events like a supernova inferrable from coarse-grained observables (like the emissions spectrum associated with supernova nucleosynthesis).
However, if something motivated you to do so, you could choose some other expanding-universe metric that is suitable for treating distant galaxies as at a lower gravitational potential, for instance. This would mean fixing a different gauge, and introducing some fictitious (gauge-dependent) forces to deal with some observables of high-redshift objects, and those would tend to complicate hypothetical communications with alien astronomers in distant galaxies. The "real" physics would -- just like the "real" physics in the cosmological frame -- be described correctly using generally covariant tensors. But you could do many calculations using simpler fields, and at least in principle that might highlight features that are obscured in the standard cosmological slicing.
Not just redshift. We're using two observables: Redshift and brightness of a very specific kind of supernova which always releases close to the same energy, i.e. amount of light. Using the 1/d² law we can relate observed brightness to distance. Redshift OTOH tells us the velocity.
Then we plot "redshift vs. sqrt(1/brightness)" and if the expansion of the universe were constant, i.e. velocity/distance (i.e. the Hubble term being constant) we'd see a linear relation between distance and velocity.
However what we actually observe is that the velocity is accelerating over distance, which means something is putting "something" extra into it. So far we can describe it only as a nonvanishing extra term in the field equations. A term which originally Einstein came up with to stabilize a static universe, but you can use it as well to "push" or "pull" on the whole of spacetime to accelerate/decelerate expansion/contraction.
For all intents and purposes this term behaves like an additional energy term in the equations. We are in the _dark_ about, what's actually causing the effects we see. And when we adjust our models to accomodate for that, an extra _energy_ term shows up. Hence "dark energy". However no astrophysicist worth his salt thinks of it as something concrete.
In the cosmology lectures I attended during my studies our professor used to pick some random name, who'd not be a student in the class at the time and instead use that, instead of "Dark Energy" to refer to that term (the "dark name" used when I was there was "Geroge" BTW), just to hammer the fact, that we don't have an effin clue what's going on, only that it's something very observable that's śhows up prominently in all the data collected for the past 20 years and you can't ignore it and have to give it some name.
Known in science as Occaam's razor.
> maybe we just didn't understand gravity very well
We definitely don't understand it when it comes to quantum scales. And maybe we don't understand it properly at macro scales.
But know that the universe is in no way obligated to be simple to the layman.
E.g. Speed of light seems to be constant, so we're going to make up all this bizarre stuff about time dilation and space faring twins.
It's been a successful heuristic, but for understanding the things that can be understood simply - we shouldn't believe that nature "wants" to be simple though...
You can come up with a model that perfectly explains the outcome ( P(e|H) = 1 ) but you have to offset the insane improbability of pegging all those free parameters at the value they are at ( P(H) ).
What makes you say this?
From what I understand of MOND, the less attraction to visible mass (as you would expect from a "ultra diffuse" galaxy like this), the smaller the effect should be. So MOND predicts the effect should be relatively small for this galaxy.
Further, in the paper that the OP references they do a calculation and get odds of something around 1/20 that a galaxy like this will exist if MOND is correct.
The interesting part is that for some reason they interpret that as ruling out MOND, while meanwhile saying "no one has any idea how this thing can exist if the dark matter theory is right". I would think "no idea how it can exist" should correspond to odds less than 1/20.
Are you claiming this is cutting off 1e-5 of the area of that Gaussian curve they fit? It looks very close to 1/20 to me. I don't care about .05, just to get an order of magnitude and compare it to the "this is an unbelievable result" quotes.
dV sigma R_major
-4.16 16.41 -3.98
10.55 3.41 -1.97
15.03 7.25 -1.85
-2.24 5.12 -0.74
1.17 5.75 0.29
-14.39 5.97 1.16
-40.39 11.3 1.52
2.24 6.61 1.58
-3.52 13.43 4.49
-1.39 10.23 6.77
Then ran this simulation in R: # Used for biweight midvariance calculation (r.bw)
require(asbio)
# Utils:
## Simulation function:
### "For a given value of sigma_test we generated 1000 samples of 10 velocities,
### distributed according to a Gaussian of width sigma_test. The ten velocities
### in each sample were then perturbed with errors, drawn from Gaussians with
### widths equal to the empirically-determined uncertainties in the measured
### dispersions.
run_sim = function(nSim, n, sigma_test, err){
replicate(nSim, rnorm(n, 0, sigma_test) + rnorm(n, 0, err))
}
## Clean up the biweight midvariance output
r.bw2 = function(x){
as.numeric(sqrt(r.bw(x)))
}
# Scraped data roughly matches what is reported in paper
## MAD (~4.7)
s_obs_nmad = mad(dat$dV)
## biweight (~8.4)
s_obs_bi = r.bw2(dat$dV)
## RMS (~14.3)
s_obs_rms = sqrt(mean(dat$dV^2))
# Run simulation to test sigma values in .1 km/s intervals
## "Using the biweight estimator, “measured” dispersions sigma_obs,test were calculated
## for all samples. If the value 8.4 is within the 16th – 84th percentile of the
## distribution of sigma_obs,test then sigma_test is within the + /-1 sigma uncertainty
## on sigma_intr. This method gives sigma_intr = 3.2 (+5.5, -3.2) kms^-1."
sigmas = seq(.1, 30, by = .1)
nSim = 1e4
out = as.data.frame(matrix(nrow = length(sigmas), ncol = 2))
colnames(out) = c("sigma_test", "s_obs_bi_percentile")
for(i in 1:length(sigmas)){
# Calculate biweights for each sim result
sim_res = run_sim(nSim, 10, sigmas[i], dat$sigma)
sigma_obs_test = apply(sim_res, 2, function(x) r.bw2(x))
# Output sigma_test and the percentile of 8.4
out[i, ] = c(sigmas[i], ecdf(sigma_obs_test)(8.4))
# Print progress
print(out[i, ])
}
# Check which sigma_test values are within the accepted percentile range
out$check = out$s_obs_bi_percentile > .16 & out$s_obs_bi_percentile < .84
# Plot the results
png("results.png", width = 960, height = 960)
plot(out[, 1], out[, 2], xlab = "sigma_test", ylab = "Percentile(8.4)", panel.first = grid())
dev.off()
I get that their observed sigma_biweight = 8.4 has percentile of p = .0146 for sigma_test = 20 (https://image.ibb.co/ncRF27/results.png). In their terminology that would mean it is just within the 99% CI, ie had odds of happening of ~ 1/70 if MOND were correct.I believe I replicated their results since it had percentile of p = .6336 for sigma_test = 0.1 and p = .1607 for sigma_test = 8.6, which matches to their sigma_int = 3.2 (+5.5, -3.2) using 16th - 84th percentiles result.
Where did you get 1/100,000?
It will surely be difficult to explain by non-dark-matter theories, but I do not think dark matter advocates are going to have any easier to explain why this galaxy (and, as far as we know, only this galaxy) doesn't have any dark matter.
It will be exciting to see what explanations both camps come up with.
On the other hand you'd expect a modification to the theories of physics themselves like MOND would apply to all objects in the universe in the same way, if you find a galaxy where the model breaks down then the model is not good enough. That would be like finding a galaxy far away where gravity itself works differently, that'd be wild.
So as far as I can tell it does seem to discredit something like MOND more than DM because you expect physical laws to be universal while it's plausible that DM could not be distributed equally everywhere.
Disclaimer: I choose my models after reduction of assumptions and stricter logic is better (Solomonoff Induction). Secondly, I understood when studying physics, that there seems something wrong, but could not put my finger on it. So, naturally it made the most sense for me, to first check all the assumptions currently used and drop those that could easily be seen differently. In fact, the BSM-SG model assumes so less, that I actually accepted it after a year of heavy studying and thinking - the first model ever for me.
It however has some "dark matter" called filaments which are the residue of the galactic crystallization egg so to say. Read some paper last year that found them, but of course, they thought it's dark matter. It is actually black black - absolutely no photon emissions even when heated to millions of degrees.
In the BSM-SG model galaxies crystallize, it does not have a big bang theory. The galactic redshift has a very different explanation.
The filaments are only located around the super massive black hole in every well formed galaxy (not globular clusters). They are the hardest and densest hard matter in the universe. Everything we know is super soft compared to this stuff. Our hole star system is maybe a cubic centimeter of this stuff.
If you take all the fragments of the fillaments and put them together they build a perfect hollow sphere that fits perfectly around the black hole. Another really wired property: if you take a cube of it and cut it in half, the mass of both parts will be more then the mass of the original cube. Sounds paradoxical at first, but once you understand how Newtonian mass is derived and that it is basically an surface property it makes sense.
If you separate ordinary matter, you don't increase to surface of atomic structures towards the vacuum. You get relativistic changes due the microcurviture, but the surface stays the same. This stuff you can cut and increase the surface until the particle is smaller then the CL node distance ~10^-20 m at which point it will loos its Newtonian mass and only the intrinsic mass will manifest. Same effect as some Neutrinos have.
But year, I'm a nut job who does not believe in what most think is true, but to be honest, I don't care. It works so wonderfully and if you can interpret papers from this models perspective, I have not found a single paper that even shakes on it's fundamentals. Some days ago a paper was posted here in which they found "magic angles" in graphene which was doted. I predicted 2 years ago that there will be some angle influence between the graphene layers.
To predict something more, you know, because I'm nuts: most of the grapheme we use is quite unordered. There are 2 possibilities in which the carbon atom can be positioned. To get a really good conductor the atoms need to be properly aligned together with the alignment of the 2 layers.
The standard perspective on the atomic nucleus is totally oversimplified and this is something quite some scientists found trough different ways. The BSM-SG model was the first model where the periodic table stared to make sense for me, together with all the isotopes.
I said that you need at least 20 something parameters to believe in the Big Bang Theory. You can't prove theories, you can only falsify. With every "prove" you just exclude all theories out of the infinite that exist, that do not predict a certain fact.
Date of introduction and parameters you can find here:
https://www.intechopen.com/books/aspects-of-today-s-cosmolog...
The email he received said "unification and proof of dark matter and quantum theories through c++ simulation" in German.
To my surprise, the code compiled in clang without warnings, but it basically did nothing. Some functions did some additions and found ratios, results of which were simply ignored.
I felt kinda sad reading the code. Maybe he imagined he was at the verge of a discovery. But these guys are most probably schizophrenic in nature, going back and forth in reality never grasping that achievement they think they are so close to.
Secondly, I know for absolute certainty that most models we believe in, are wrong if you take the combined perceptive into account. There are nutjobs out there how actually believe there is a difference between physics, chemistry and astrophysics. Every model that has paradoxes must have errors.
So, please, falsify it for me, I take logical or mathematical arguments as well as publicly accepted measurements interpreted under this model. Everything else is just bullshit. Just because many people believe something does not make it right, in fact history has shown the opposite (if it concerns natural sciences).
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Structures-Matter-Supergravitat...
This is the only more or less complete description of the model, if you think it's to expensive, and still want to falsify it (please do), I can give you a pdf. Take into account that you will need a year or so to really grasp it, it's a thick book with quite dense content.
Still, that's exactly the kind of thinking that pushes science forward when it's well reasoned and takes into account all of the observations. Where your model falls on that spectrum I cannot say.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stoyan_Sargoytchev
It triggered my curiosity, but I did not understand the model from it. I understood that the perspective is quite different, but I got many things wrong (my fault). Then I started to read the main book I linked in the other comment.
One advise: Start at the beginning and read linear. After some weeks/months it will start to click and things start to make much more sense then. After that you can jump in the book and it will not be confused. If you just jump into the middle because you are looking for an easy answer for something of your interest, it will just be confusing. One of the reviewer on amazon seem to have done that, that's the 1 star opinion without any quality argument.
There are two possibilities to explain the physical world: complicated or complex (sorry easy answers will not work). This model takes the complex way, nothing is really complicated in this model, but the level of detail is enormous compared to the default perspective. We normally thing the neutrino is small, in this model it's huge.
We have measurements of the size of neutrino (well, for the definition of size that makes sense for such objects)
The reason for the second requirement is I don't know enough physics to call bullshit on bullshit. So I'd prefer to read a third party who does know enough discussing the results than the original author.
My google foo isn't finding anything.
The problem I see is that it just takes to much time for most people to really dig into this to a point where write something as deep as the original theory is possible. As always, working with fringe sciences will bring you no luck in the scientific community.
Don't get me wrong, I would also take one page that seriously falsifies the theory so I can move on. Would have been nice but isn't, that's OK. I will be sad, but letting theories go is part of development.
I have talked to countless people in person and usually I can quickly answer their questions and it works much better then mediums like this one. Unfortunately, there seem not much coming out of this except getting some fans. I have spent surely months writing emails to physicists, asking them about their opinion. Not a single good answer, some show interest but that's it.
As I also follow more critical views on climate change then IPCC, from my perspective an open mind and theories like this are the last hope for human survival. And don't come me with renewable energies like solar - we increased CO2 output by 2% in 2017 and this is without melting permafrost and other feedback loops we triggered. Most people just don't get it that we are in free fall now, the blue ocean event is right in front of our doorsteps.
To be honest, my perspective is quite dark, especially consider our track record of f*ing things up :(
My hope is in a different place than yours. I don’t think we have a physics problem. We have all the technology we need to live in (roughly) closed carbon systems. It’s a mix of very old tech and some new electronics. There are thousands of people refining the details every day on YouTube. Search “permaculture vlog”.
All we are lacking is 1) a viral teaching tool. And 2) digital tools for distributed governance of shared small resources like some acres of land or a tractor.
But thousands are working feverishly on these issues right now also.
I fear a runaway carbon event as you do. But even in a return to the Cretaceous (likely), permaculture still works. People do it in the desert.
As in, I believe there are invisible blobs that keep cars close together. I observe some cars far apart and i say "hey look at all that missing blobs"
you miss my point entirely, your explanation is around an assumption of dark matter. You are not saying this galaxy behaves in such a way that MOND cannot explain, you are saying the galaxy behaves in such a way that based on believing in dark matter, this galaxy moves as if it doesnt have it thus MOND is wrong.
MOND can not explain a galaxy without dark matter as it is a proposal for the modification of the laws of gravity at large distances, and can explain the already-observed galaxies that behave as if they have dark matter (or, as MOND posits, the laws of gravity are different than what we have observed on earth.)
Explanation 1: MOND -- modified gravity at that scale, just works differently than we guessed.
Explanation 2: Dark Matter
Now this is galaxy 2, and from visible matter, we expect rotation curve B, and we get rotation curve A!
So no, if it's just visible matter interacting w/ a modified version of gravity, it should predict consistent rotation curves. But we see two types. Thus it is directly problematic for MOND.
No, that's exactly what's being stated. MOND doesn't predict this galaxy. This galaxy rotates slower than others of similar directly observable mass. In other words, it confirms the current model of gravity, which by definition is evidence against any modified model of gravity.
> "This galaxy discovery, though, appears to be strong evidence against MOND or other modified-gravity theories since the dark matter is missing in this case."
Since MOND assumes that dark matter does not exist (or at least does not interact with gravity), then under MOND this galaxy should not exist. MOND stipulates that all galaxies of a given size should rotate at the same speed, and that speed is greater than that predicted by newtonian mechanics. This galaxy defies MOND predictions, and appears to obey Newton's. Does that make sense or am I missing something else?
I seem to have to qualify my statements with this but I am not attacking the idea of dark matter (nor am I defending MOND) I am just questioning the logic of this one point.
----Edit------ I think it could be confusing what i mean by saying there is no mechanism explaining why dark matter exists. I just mean specifically why. It is a theory that postulates the existence of something but does not give a mechanism to how it gets there. This is not my field of research though so I could be terribly wrong about that.
Dark matter is exciting in part because it intersects particle physics with cosmology, and has the potential to solve problems in both (e.g. rotation curves and neutrino masses). It's appealing in part because it's parsimonious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulum_Galaxy
Nice shot!
noetic_techy:
> what if the key to dark matter is some unknown property of the central black hole [...] ?
cowboysauce:
> Well, then you encounter problems with things like the triangulum Galaxy. Which has dark matter, but no supermassive black hole.
The initial comment was about a "central" black hole (which may indeed exist), not a "supermassive" black hole.
The fact that galaxies form and light is being bent is not evidence: it is the problem. We don't actually have any classical scientific evidence of the stuff. Dark matter is handwavium. It may be real, but it not being is just as plausible. When the Earth was flat and the universe revolved around it, we solved problems with our theories by adding escape clauses to them: epicycles. An effect was explained with an effect, and dark matter fits that's profile perfectly.
MOND could be incorrect, but it is valuable as an alternative line of thought. There needs to be more like it. Science needs to get into the routine of failure once again, we are making no progress without it.
Here’s a not-so-bold prediction: sometime this century some team will detect something new that explains some but not all of the effects we currently attribute to dark matter. We will call it the explanation to the problem and the remainder will be given a new catchy name and people on the HN of the future will complain that this thing is simple hand waving.
> people on the HN of the future will complain that this thing is simple hand waving.
So long as we don't fall into a local minimum in the theory space forever, I'd be happy. Progress is progress, no matter how slow.