Quote:
Originally Posted by Vena
Dark Matter is getting confusing for me. Every few months I see a new report purporting a discovery and then, latter, a new report baffling the pants off of everyone with a discovery that brings to question current dark matter understanding or previous dark matter results. (It was about a year ago when they had the report on two clusters which passed through each other without any of the expected dark matter effects (ie the center of mass was not where it should have been... at all).
Dark matter has been "found" for a while now, though. Wikipedia has an entire chart of observed support.
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I think the news just needed an attractive title or that every detection of dark matter is a good discovery.
But I have one burning question I've always wanted to ask: Why can't dark matter just be normal matter like hydrogen and helium which are abundant but spread so thinly that they do not get detected by our instruments?
As far as I know, if telescopes don't point at the right spot for a long enough exposure time, things can skip detection. Or that there are not enough matter or radiation sources to reflect light in the region, stuff can be invisible on various wavelengths.
I always see alot of crazy theories that try to introduce a bunch of whole new particles to describe dark matter.