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https://phys.org/news/2024-01-stars-slowly-milky-edge-galaxy.html
By clocking the speed of stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, MIT physicists have found that stars further out in the galactic disk are traveling more slowly than expected compared to stars that are closer to the galaxy's center. The findings raise a surprising possibility: The Milky Way's gravitational core may be lighter in mass, and contain less dark matter, than previously thought.
The new results are based on the team's analysis of data taken by the Gaia and APOGEE instruments. Gaia is an orbiting space telescope that tracks the precise location, distance, and motion of more than 1 billion stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, while APOGEE is a ground-based survey.
The physicists analyzed Gaia's measurements of more than 33,000 stars, including some of the farthest stars in the galaxy, and determined each star's "circular velocity," or how fast a star is circling in the galactic disk, given the star's distance from the galaxy's center.
[...] The team translated the new rotation curve into a distribution of dark matter that could explain the outer stars' slow-down, and found the resulting map produced a lighter galactic core than expected. That is, the center of the Milky Way may be less dense, with less dark matter, than scientists have thought.
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday January 31 2024, @11:33PM (1 child)
Why this overall topic is relevant, is per Occam's razor the simplest explanation for weird radial velocity distributions is simply creationism.
If you run the simulation in reverse and it breaks "awhile ago" then there's something wrong with your simulation code (unlikely, or so we think) or your input data (unlikely, we double checked the hell out of it all) or there's some discontinuity in the past (maybe?).
I'm just stating without belief or prejudice that the state of astrophysics since the 70s is that the theory that best explains galactic rotation is "Young Earth Creationism". I'm not throwing down the authoritarianism that certain groups are right or wrong or will always be right or always be wrong, and perhaps theory will go beyond that someday in the future, but I'm just saying galactic astrophysics for the last 50 years has only one successful predictive model and its not as atheistic as some other branches of science.
Also I'm not saying "Young Earth Creationism" works better as a predictive theory for geology, or oil prospecting, or genetic research, or a crap-ton of other scientific fields. I am, however, seriously claiming "Young Earth Creationism" is currently the best predictive theory galactic astrophysicists have been able to come up with for half a century.
My impression of astrophysics, especially galactic scale stuff like this dark matter controversy, is like imagining the ancient Greeks trying to debate emacs vs vi, or theorize about what would Julius Caesar think of AMD vs Intel processor strategies circa late 2010s. Human civilization at this stage can't get beyond numerology and generally tossing stuff at the wall to see what sticks WRT astrophysics, sorry, better off ignoring the situation and come back later in a couple centuries when we MIGHT have a better chance at figuring it out.
We did a great job at the industrial revolution because civilization was at the right stage at the right time WRT math and engineering and finance to figure out stuff like, for example, steam tables and advanced steel metallurgy. But 2000s era civilization isn't ready to do galactic scale astrophysics research. We CAN fund people to F around and do numerology and make shit up, kind of like the soft-sciences of psych and sociology, but "we" can't make progress in astrophysics at this time. Maybe in a couple centuries. But for now, for better or worse, WRT galactic scale astrophysics, "Young Earth Creationism" is the theory that best matches our observations and we may as well save time and money and stick with that until we have a realistic chance at real progress in the field. Basically we've been flushing money down the toilet for the last half century. If we had just piled up the money and burned it, at least we could have roasted some marshmallows.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2024, @06:49AM
oh wacky VLM is at it again