The Starry Sky Just Got Starrier

An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have surveyed eight elliptical galaxies, and found that we've vastly underestimated the number of dim red dwarf stars in these giant galaxies. When they used the new number of red dwarfs in their calculations, they tripled the total number of known stars in the universe."

Comments

Re:first? or third?

[UnknownSoldier]

> True, Dark Matter, like Dark Energy, is just a placeholder name for something that we _think_ is there.

FTFY.

Probably will get modded down, but if you "knew" it, then you would be able to prove it exists. Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it, therefore it is a mathematical kludge, aka, the aether of the 1900s. (Yes, I'm aware of http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html )

Ergo, while said more politely, "it falls out of the math", which will allthough appear quite reasonable at first, given the current limitations of understanding gravity / light / mass & energy, it is still one a big hack-job based on one assumption after another, namely:
  a) that there is only one type of gravity and
  b) gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
  c) redshift is accurate (ARP has interesting evidence that calls into question this assumption)

This prof. provides a half-decent summary though:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph123/lec08.html

Re:first? or third?

[spun]

I believe this is one piece of very strong evidence for some sort of pervasive weakly interacting massive stuff. Two galaxies collide. The normal matter interacts with other normal matter and slows down, The "other stuff" does not interact, and keeps moving. We know it is there because it creates a gravitational lens. If the lensing were caused by any sort of matter that interacted with other matter, these lenses would not be located where they are.

So the theory of Dark Matter is more than just "there is more stuff than we can see." We can see specific phenomenon that normal matter just can not produce.