Fermi Space Telescope Fails to See Evidence Of Dark Matter

technologyreview.com

13 points·jcr··5 comments

Specifically, fails to see evidence that dark matter is made up of Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) which should annihilate and produce gamma rays occasionally.

Dark matter dominates the mass (90% or more) of all galaxies, not just dim dwarf galaxies. The gravitational aspect of dark matter and is not widely disputed.

Ideally, this experiment would be run on a "dark galaxy" which contains only a dark matter halo and no stars, but we haven't found one yet. The issue with visible galaxies is there may be black holes and other sources of gamma rays created by normal matter.

So we have so far no other evidence for dark matter other than the absence of matter to explain the rotation-speed curve of galaxies?

Additional evidence is provided by gravitational lensing observations, the most spectacular of which is the Bullet Cluster: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060824.html

Dark matter is not needed to explain the rotation of galixies. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3778 Assuming that paper is true, dark matter is not the simplest idea and by Ockham's razor, we should drop dark matter as known today.

Interesting, do you have some reputable links to something dissecting the claims in the paper?

I would have thought mathematical mistakes would have been classed out long ago. Certainly it would have been the first place people looked at the difference in predictions vs observations.

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