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Vast Web of Dark Matter Mapped
astroengine writes "Astronomers from the University of British Columbia and University of Edinburgh have created a vast cosmic map revealing an intricate web of dark matter and galaxies spanning a distance of one billion light-years. This is the largest map of its kind and demonstrates that this large-scale web stretches across the universe in all directions. The results of this groundbreaking discovery were presented at the American Astronomical Society conference in Austin, Texas on Monday."
Looking longer and longer by the day. Aether was invented because people felt it SHOULD exist, but expected consequences of it completely failed to show up. Dark matter was invented because there were observations that are very hard to explain any other way and fit increasingly precisely with one another if dark matter is the cause -- there are several different ways of measuring the distribution of dark matter among various clusters of galaxies, and they are giving remarkably consistent answers.
A better example would be phlogiston, which was invented to explain observations, but eventually failed to explain all observations, so it was replaced by a better theory. The same could happen to dark matter, but there are no signs at the moment,
The part you're ignoring is that unlike the aether, there is actual evidence for dark matter, quite a lot of it actually. It's true that at the time it was conceived it was little more than a fudge factor, but that time has long since passed. The Bullet Cluster, for example, is probably the stongest single piece of evidence, though by no means the only one. It has a core of regular matter surrounded by a large halo of dark matter which can be observed by measuring the gravitational lensing of light passing through the region.
Fair enough, the same effect could be produced by bending spacetime in some other way, but the only way we know about today is with gravitational mass. Scientists find the assumption that there is a kind of matter we can't see much more readily than they will take the assumption that there is some force other than gravity (or some source of gravity other than mass) that warps spacetime to such a degree over such large volumes of space.