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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 bob_super on Friday December 07 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
The problem is that the theories are really really good at explaining almost everything we can observe ... except missing a quantity of mass.
If you add Dark Matter (now Fluid) to the universe theories, you can explain so much, and verify it it's really hard to just say "this whole thing is completely wrong because it doesn't work unless I add Dark Matter"
It's wrong because it needs some imaginary construct (call it Phlogiston or Aether, wink wink) to deal with that one piece which doesn't work. But it works for almost everything else in a way that no other theory comes even close.
Until we figure out that missing piece of math or mass, that's the best we got, but non-lazy journalists and authors should always explain what it means rather than throw it out as a certainty.
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday December 07 2018, @05:03PM
That matches pretty well with my understanding, the crux of my confusion is that the tested and very reliable model stands even when incomplete, why do we need to claim to know something we don't to complete it?
To the best of my knowledge dark matter in particular gives no new insight, no new way to test the laws of nature, it seems totally valueless. The search for the missing math or mass is important and worth our time, but starting from the supposition that that mass must exist gets us dark energy as a bodge to the bodge, and now an assumption that 95% of the mass and 68% of the total energy of the universe are mysteriously hidden from us. Now perhaps that is a misconception on my part, I have always heard dark matter necessitates dark energy, but does the standard model still need dark energy to explain expansion without dark matter? My previous understanding was that it didn't, which is pretty central to my confusion with this whole process.
And starting from a wild hypothesis and seeing where that theory takes you can absolutely be of value, I just don't understand how this particular theory achieved the consensus it seems to have.
I have seen a very uniform acceptance of dark matter and energy, and the only people I see searching for math not mass seem to be relegated to fringe. Likely that observation is bad, but I suspect that there is some kernel of what makes "dark matter is 95% of the total mass of the universe" preferable to "no model consistent with current science explains the rate of galactic rotation" that I am just plain missing.