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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:52PM
True, however, since it has negative mass, a repulsive force will actually pull it towards you. -F = (-m)*a
Of course, it repels you with an equal force, but if you're pulling it in from all directions that cancels out.
Then you can capture it in a huge bottle, set it behind your space ship, and allow the repulsive force to accelerate you both in the same direction indefinitely.
Negative mass is weird, and there's several models out there that vary as to whether it's gravitational or inertial mass that's negative, or both. In this case they're clearly talking about both, since it's supposed to be attracted to the mass of a galaxy, while simultaneously pushing the stars inward. Presumably this stuff is spread all through the galaxy as well, but with a density that plateaus at some point as self-repulsion balances out the attractive effect of the normal matter.