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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."
I'm not discounting the importance of this work scientifically, but the implications of dust in making a galaxy appear dim has been known for a long time, and this work no way gives us definitive answers to the nagging dust extinction issues.
Therefore it is questionable whether this is a popular-science news worthy finding. As someone who has worked closely in the field, I feel the way the report has been written only serves to fool the public into thinking something is really different about the current state of astronomy.
But then the public doesn't really care, you know. I wonder why astronomy news are so abundant in public, when most of them really have little implications for society and worse yet, the popular science articles often miss the gists of whatever the science discoveries really mean.
PR in astronomy is excellent in that they do fairly well on improving their public image, but often horrendous in conveying the substance of what they really do.
Perhaps this will have implications for some of the standard candles? If objects suddenly aren't that far off, they will shrink in size and kinetic energy estimates will drop making the case for dark matter weaker.
Dark Matter is a theoretical answer to "the universe has more matter than it looks like." If the universe, in fact, actually has more matter, then there's less, possibly zero, need for the hand-waving "Dark matter" theory.
Unless an astrophycisst (sic - lazy) has actual numbers as to what % of the total matter is "dark", we won't know what effect, if any, this discovery has on the dark-matter theory.
The point is that the new model shows that what was previously thought to be sown up, the shortfall between the observed matter, and the amount required to account for the observed behavior is not quite as sown up as we thought.
So while this discovery does not mean that we have now observed all the mass necessary, it does mean that it would be prudent to look again very hard at how we have derived the mass of the universe in case we have left out mass along the line.
There are also other challenges on dark matter. The reason the whole concept exists is that there does not appear to be enough visible matter to explain the rotation of galaxies. However even this has recently being challenged, with the argument that using Newtonian dynamics to model galactic rotation is flawed, and if you do the same modeling using General Relativity (much much harder to do) the missing mass appears to vanish. I am the first to admit that there are issues with the paper that proposes this. However it is an important new avenue of research.
There is also the possibility that we might have gravity wrong, at very low accelerations which would also make dark matter go away.
My personal feeling is that dark matter is about as likely as the ether, and in reality we have not counted the mass accurately and are miss-applying theories.
Then again I think Copenhagen interpretation is hokum as well.
The various discrepancies referred to by the GP are interesting because they represent quantifiable gaps in cosmological theory. The discrepancy between observation and Newtonian prediction of the period of Mercury's orbit could be explained by unsatisfactory inventions such as the interstellar ether; similarly, dark matter began as a stopgap invention.
However, as the GP mentioned, surprising evidence is cropping up that the universe contains vast quantities of weakly-interacting matter. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands up as you do and claim it's the flying spaghetti monster. We ought to continue observing, theorizing, predicting, checking and refining our understanding of the universe. Perhaps non-intuitive sorts of matter do exist! Or, the investigation of it might lead to theories superseding the current ones as relativity replaced Newtonian physics.