06 March 2008
Zeeya Merali
Magazine issue 2646
FRESH battle lines are being drawn in the debate over whether dark matter is needed to explain the structure of galaxies.
Those physicists who would like to throw out dark matter in favor of a controversial new form of gravity are facing one of their biggest challenges yet. It seems that if their theory is valid, the Earth should have been swallowed up long ago by black holes that would regularly appear in our solar system. Dark matter's opponents are not ready to give up just yet, though. A "dark fluid" sloshing around galaxies like ours might just allow them to fight another day.
Dark matter has been proposed to explain why spiral galaxies are not torn apart by their rapid rotation. The favored view among cosmologists is that the gravitational force exerted by some kind of dark matter must be pulling the outer stars in. Though physicists are closing ...
more: space.newscientist.com/articl...on.html
Zeeya Merali
Magazine issue 2646
FRESH battle lines are being drawn in the debate over whether dark matter is needed to explain the structure of galaxies.
Those physicists who would like to throw out dark matter in favor of a controversial new form of gravity are facing one of their biggest challenges yet. It seems that if their theory is valid, the Earth should have been swallowed up long ago by black holes that would regularly appear in our solar system. Dark matter's opponents are not ready to give up just yet, though. A "dark fluid" sloshing around galaxies like ours might just allow them to fight another day.
Dark matter has been proposed to explain why spiral galaxies are not torn apart by their rapid rotation. The favored view among cosmologists is that the gravitational force exerted by some kind of dark matter must be pulling the outer stars in. Though physicists are closing ...
more: space.newscientist.com/articl...on.html
posted by:
|
