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Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted
TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com:
Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster.
"The signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. "With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations," added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."
"The signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. "With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations," added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."
I can only wonder how the researchers arrived at their conclusion when there are so very many other sources of X-rays in the universe.
It's probably because they're better qualified in physics than you are.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's not a bad thing to be extra cautious around buzz words.
Dark matter isn't a buzz word, at least not to the people who are actually trying to discover if it exists, and what it is. It's a hypothesis, or a class of hypotheses.
Dark Matter feels like a fudge factor for our ability to observe the universe or our models of it.
You could say that about anything that was hypothesised before it was confirmed - the atomic nucleus, photons, quantum mechanics.
Hey, these numbers don't add up- just stick in another variable.
And then see if the new model is a better match for observations, work out if there are any other consequences of the new variable, search for experimental evidence of those consequences... AKA science.
Is it more likely that there is a magic unobservable substance that makes our models correct or that our models need tuning?
That the model needs tuning is already given, because we've got observations that the model can't explain, so there's no "or" about it. The "magic unobservable substance" seems to be the best explanation anyone's been able to come up with so far.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.