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Bizarre "Dark Fluid" With Negative Mass Could Dominate the Universe

posted by takyon on Thursday December 06 2018, @09:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the dark-and-wet dept.

hopdevil and Fluffeh submitted:

Bizarre 'dark fluid' with negative mass could dominate the universe – what my research suggests

It's embarrassing, but astrophysicists are the first to admit it. Our best theoretical model can only explain 5% of the universe. The remaining 95% is famously made up almost entirely of invisible, unknown material dubbed dark energy and dark matter. So even though there are a billion trillion stars in the observable universe, they are actually extremely rare.

The two mysterious dark substances can only be inferred from gravitational effects. Dark matter may be an invisible material, but it exerts a gravitational force on surrounding matter that we can measure. Dark energy is a repulsive force that makes the universe expand at an accelerating rate. The two have always been treated as separate phenomena. But my new study, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, suggests they may both be part of the same strange concept – a single, unified "dark fluid" of negative masses.

Negative masses are a hypothetical form of matter that would have a type of negative gravity – repelling all other material around them. Unlike familiar positive mass matter, if a negative mass was pushed, it would accelerate towards you rather than away from you.

[...] My model shows that the surrounding repulsive force from dark fluid can also hold a galaxy together. The gravity from the positive mass galaxy attracts negative masses from all directions, and as the negative mass fluid comes nearer to the galaxy it in turn exerts a stronger repulsive force onto the galaxy that allows it to spin at higher speeds without flying apart. It therefore appears that a simple minus sign may solve one of the longest standing problems in physics.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:20PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:20PM (#770895) Journal

    I hear an awful lot about dark matter and energy, and now apparently fluid.

    Fluid is used here in a very generic way. They're just saying that they can model the "negative mass" as a fluid. In a similar sense, stars of a galaxy or sand in a jar are fluids.

    If they were simply offered as potential (and perhaps tenuous given the lack of any positive evidence) explanations that would be one thing, but the idea that only 5% of mass is visible is touted as proven fact widely enough that I regularly encounter it.

    One important prediction of such models is that the effect scales with the concentration of the negative mass which is implied in this story to vary. That means we should see galaxies with more and less of the gravitational anomalies that we're having so much trouble with. There does seem some mild support [soylentnews.org] for that. OTOH, if it's a universal effect (say that space is just curved that way and there is no negative energy at all), then you won't see such variations.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:39PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:39PM (#770905) Journal

    Hey, a shout-out! Thanks! :)

    But DARPA is supporting him a well
    https://earthsky.org/space/rocket-thrust-quantized-inertia-qi-darpa-funding [earthsky.org]

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 07 2018, @12:38AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 07 2018, @12:38AM (#770960) Journal
      I should have mentioned that as one of the global theories, especially since I linked to it. I think there's something wrong with the quantized inertia theory, but it's worth a look.