Intergalactic Missing Mass Missing Again

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers at the University Of Alabama In Huntsville have discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of 'warm' gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons — leaving the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter (in terms of its ordinary matter) than previously calculated. In 2002 the same team reported finding large amounts of extra 'soft' (relatively low-energy) x-rays coming from the vast spaces in the middle of galaxy clusters. Their cumulative mass was thought to account for as much as ten percent of the mass and gravity needed to hold together galaxies, galaxy clusters, and perhaps the universe itself. When the team looked at data from a galaxy cluster in the southern sky, however, they found that energy from those additional soft x-rays doesn't look like it should. 'The best, most logical explanation seems to be that a large fraction of the energy comes from electrons smashing into photons instead of from warm atoms and ions, which would have recognizable spectral emission lines,' said Dr. Max Bonamente. The work was published Oct. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal."

Comments

Do the math.

[644bd346996]

Please. It really isn't hard to show that the dependency on r can only take on a few values and still yield a universe that comes at all close to what we observe. For example, the only halfway-plausible power of r that allows closed orbits (such as planets around stars) in classical mechanics is exactly 2. All other values either don't allow closed orbits in general, or are trivially shown by experiment to be absurdly wrong. Now, we have observed that orbits aren't exactly closed (the most famous example being the precession of the perihelion of Mercury), but these were explained astoundingly well by relativity.

Astrophysics is way beyond getting the growth rate of a fundamental force wrong.

Re:The falloff of light is 1/r^2

[Jarjarthejedi]

Precisely. I know you've gotten a lot of poor responses but I've always thought this was a good theory (from when I first heard of the idea in MOND Modified Newtonian Gravity). Science has made a lot of assumptions about the universe, and this is one of them. Whether gravity falls off at a slightly slower rate or there is a large volume of unknown matter in the universe the end result will be the same, so why do people so quickly call others idiots when they suggest an alternate explanation?