Hope this is the right place to put something like this :x

Anyway, I was searching through some msn articles and found this; Dark Matter: All Wrong?

It was posted 3 days ago and I didnt see it already posted here. So hopefully it hasnt been.

I dont quite understand everything they're talking about it (not being a science whiz myself) but i'll quote some of it to entice you to click the link =P



The picture on the right of the article has become, as you can see, my avy because I really thought it was some sort of monster's eyes at first >> But it's actually two galaxies.

Anyway, just thought this article was interesting.

It is an interesting question. I'm going to draw from a post I made a few days ago to make a point about this. The issue behind all this (as noted in the article you linked to) is that galaxies don't rotate the way we'd expect them to. Now, when observation fails to match what the known equations and laws predict you have two options:

• You can have faith that the equations are working reasonably well and thus conclude that they're telling you something new about the universe. In the early 19th century, the orbit of Uranus was found to deviate significantly from what Newtonian mechanics would predict. Le Verrier (and Adams, though his calculations were a little less accurate) took the correctness of the physics as his starting point and concluded that some unseen body was out there mucking things up. He produced calculations to predict the orbit of such a body and, of course, Neptune was found shortly after. This is the approach that has, by and large, been adopted in interpreting why galactic dynamics aren't working the way they ought to. It's been known since at least the 1930s when Fritz Zwicky announced the missing mass problem that galaxies act as if they contain a great deal more mass than we observe in them. If we accept the equations, then that must indeed be what's happening. The only problem is that we can't turn our telescopes to some point in the sky and spot Neptune; we're dealing with something that is by definition optically invisible. But this is where the dark matter hypothesis comes from.
  
• You can take the approach that there's something missing from the equations. In the middle of the 19th century it was discovered that the perihelion of Mercury (the point of its closest approach to the Sun) was precessing (i.e. moving a little with every trip around the Sun) a little bit more than classical mechanics predicted it should. So Le Verrier swung into action one again, predicting this time that a small planet, Vulcan, existed between Mercury and the Sun and was causing the problem. But despite his earlier success with assuming the equations were correct and predicting the existence of Neptune, this time Le Verrier struck out. It was the physics itself that needed tweaking. A broader, more all-encompassing theory was required to explain the anomalous precession of Mercury and the general theory of relativity, when unveiled in 1916, did so beautifully. Some researchers are taking this tack today with regard to dark matter (and dark energy). The idea is that if the equations don't quite predict what we see, then instead of predicting some optically invisible mass, maybe they're trying to tell us that they instead need some fixing. The original attempt to do this (I believe) was an idea called MOND, proposed 25 years ago. The idea there was to tweak Newton's law of gravitation so that in very, very low acceleration circumstances (like for stars on the outskirts of galaxies) the force of gravity was actually stronger than the unaltered law would predict. This original formulation had some problems but the idea of modifying our understanding of gravitation instead of assuming some form of dark matter exists lives on, in some cases in a much more sophisticated form.

So perhaps dark matter will ultimately go the way of the planet Vulcan and turn out to not exist. Our understanding of gravitation in certain circumstances and on certain scales may need to be modified. Even so, perhaps dark matter really does exist. There are certainly several different lines of evidence that something is out there and certain theories do predict particles that might be contributing to the dark matter problem. But we should never forget that the jury is still out on a number of things.