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Galaxies Twice As Bright As Previously Thought
Astronomers led by Simon Driver of Scotland's University of St. Andrews have discovered that interstellar dust shades us from as much as 50% of the light emitted by stars and galaxies. The scientists compared the number of galaxies we could see "edge-on" against the number which were "facing us," reasoning that dust would obscure more of the former, since we already receive less light from them. SPACE.com notes, "In fact, the researchers counted about 70 percent fewer edge-on galaxies than face-on galaxies." A NYTimes report provides some additional details:
"Interstellar dust absorbs the visible light emitted by stars and then re-radiates it as infrared, or heat, radiation. But when astronomers measured this heat glow from distant galaxies, the dust appeared to be putting out more energy than the stars. 'You can't get more energy out than you put in, so we knew something was very wrong,' said Dr. Driver. The results also mean that there is about 20 percent more mass in stars than previously thought."
Dark matter is non-interacting. It only exerts a gravitational force. It would not obscure the light of galaxies (except to bend the light through gravitious pull).
He wasn't suggesting that the DUST is the dark matter. He was suggesting that the stars' unaccounted-for mass is, at least part of, the "dark" matter: the matter that we cannot observe except by it's gravitational effects.
The article suggests two things by stating that the dust is obscuring galaxies more than previously thought:
1) there is more mass in the galaxies than previously thought (to be generating the light we don't see)
2) there is more mass in the dust than previously thought.
"dark" matter is in it's essence, unaccounted for matter. In a sense, Neptune was a "dark" planet until it was observed. Astronomers have suggested that the reason we haven't observed the "missing mass" is that it is not observable. The article does, in fact, suggest that at least part of the missing mass may be unobservable for mundane reasons rather than new physics.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Have you measured the effect of gravity on light recently? You ever notice how your flashlight beam actually falls towards the ground when you aim it straight out? No? That's because it's trivially small.
To obscure light, matter would need to absorb it. Assuming that it cannot, the closest to "obscuring" that gravitational interactions could do is to bend it a little so it's facing a different direction. Lensing, and all that fun. I suppose in the worst case, a patch of dark matter could act to randomly diffuse the light going through it, but since it IS matter and it is gravitationally bound, it tends to form clusters like other matter, and you're not going to see diffusion over the million-light-year gaps between the galaxies being observed.
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From reading TFA, the dust they are talking about is *within* the galaxies. Because of it galaxies don't emit as brightly edge-wise.
But perpendicular to the plane there is little dust absorption. So the brightness of galaxies viewed this way shouldn't need much correction. Since most galaxies are viewed this way due to the bias caused by this effect, why would there need to be a major rethink of stellar brightness? I'm not getting it.
Maybe it's galactic density that needs correction.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
There seem to be a lot of questions about dark matter, so I'll do my best to answer them.
1)Dark matter is indeed postulated to account for the discrepancy between gravitational measurements of the mass distribution of galaxies vs evidence from other sources.
2)We know that dark matter can't be accounted for by large mass objects (like planets, asteroids, dust, etc) because CMB measurements tell us that the total amount of baryonic matter ('normal' matter made up of protons and neutrons) is a small fraction of the total matter in the universe (around 15%). So it must be made of heavy non-baryonic particles. This, by the way, is the reason why the discovery mentioned in TFA has little impact on dark matter. There is already an upper limit on the amount of baryonic mass in the universe, irrespective of what we see with telescopes.
3) We know that these particles can't interact electromagnetically or with the strong force, otherwise they would end up in atoms (either as part of the nucleus or orbiting the nucleus). In this case, these atoms would be much heavier than normal atoms and we would see evidence of them in the spectral lines of stars.
4)That leaves us with particles which interact only through the weak force, like neutrinos. We have also found that dark matter plays an important role in the formation of structure in the universe, and in order for structure to form in the way it has, the dark matter must be moving at non-relativistic speeds at that time. This rules out the neutrino, which would be moving at speeds very close to the speed of light at that time.
I came here for a good argument