Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter

An anonymous reader writes Once again, a shadow of a signal that scientists hoped would amplify into conclusive evidence of dark matter has instead flatlined, repeating a maddening refrain in the search for the invisible, omnipresent particles. The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) failed to detect the glow of gamma rays emitted by annihilating dark matter in miniature "dwarf" galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, scientists reported Friday at a meeting in Nagoya, Japan. The hint of such a glow showed up in a Fermi analysis last year, but the statistical bump disappeared as more data accumulated. "We were obviously somewhat disappointed not to see a signal," said Matthew Wood, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who was centrally involved the Fermi-LAT collaboration's new analysis, in an email.

Comments

We don't know anything is weird here

[fyngyrz]

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not terms that should conjure up weirdness in your mind. Not at this point, anyway.

Neither concept has a shred of evidence behind it indicating that anything exotic is going on. If you really want a good handle on the terms, just think of them as "We hope some sources of energy and matter we can't detect are out there because otherwise, the math behind our hypotheses doesn't work."

It's a limitation of trying to figure out what's going on incredible distances -- and times -- from us with a combination of barely functional tools, our (decent, I'm guessing) grasp of science, and the participant's intuitions.

Re:We don't know anything is weird here

[PvtVoid]

There is a huge amount of evidence

IANAP but wouldn't you phrase this somewhat differently?

Why should he phrase it differently? There is a huge amount of evidence. As in, multiple, independent measurements that all point in exactly the same direction:

- Galactic rotation curves
- Gravitational lensing
- Cosmic Microwave Background acoustic oscillations
- Cluster baryon fractions from X-ray measurements
- Large-scale structure

All of these things require something like dark matter to make any sense at all.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

In particular, it is like the Luminiferous Aether because it is a hastily invented answer to something we've observed when the problem is we don't properly understand the question.