Deflating Claims That ESA Craft Has Spotted Dark Matter

Yesterday, we posted news that data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft had been interpreted as a possible sign of dark matter; researchers noted that a spike in X-ray emissions from two different celestial objects, the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster, matched just what they "were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges." StartsWithABang writes with a skeptical rejoinder: There seems to be a formula for this very specific extraordinary claim: point your high-energy telescope at the center of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, discover an X-ray or gamma ray signal that you can't account for through conventional, known astrophysics, and claim you've detected dark matter! Only, these results never pan out; they've turned out either to be due to conventional sources or simply non-detections every time. There's a claim going around the news based on this paper recently that we've really done it this time, and yet that's not even physically possible, as our astrophysical constraints already rule out a particle with this property as being the dark matter!

Comments

Re:Dark matter and the sniff test

[Baloroth]

However, for some reason unknown to me, the visible matter in our solar system perfectly describes how the planets orbit the sun, how the moon orbits the earth, and how hard I hit the ground when I try to fly. So where is this dark matter, all this extra gravity? Shouldn't I hit the ground a lot harder than we can explain just based on the mass of our planet?

It's because dark matter only interacts gravitationally. See, normal matter clumps up into planets and stars because it sticks to other particles, and loses energy from collisions, causing it to collapse over time into locally dense spheres (planets, stars, black holes, etc.). But dark matter doesn't: it just passes through itself (mostly: it may interact through the weak force, but only very very very rarely if so, not enough to clump up). That means it doesn't form local regions of high density. On the other hand, an object immersed in a more or less uniform sea of matter (of any kind) won't notice any gravitational effects, because it's being pulled in all directions equally (for example: you'd be weightless at the center of the Earth. Dead from the pressure/heat/lack of air, but weightless). So, we can float through a sea, even a fairly dense one, of dark matter and notice nothing at all. Now, there is an non-uniformity in this dark matter "sea": there is more on the side of us towards the center of the galaxy than there is on the other side, but that pulls the entire solar system uniformly, accelerating it in it's galactic orbit, and that effect we do in fact see.