Physical SciencesWordPress.com

Triton Station

Triton Station
A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter
Home PageAtom FeedMastodon
language
Published

OK, basic review is over. Shit’s gonna get real. Here I give a short recounting of the primary reason I came to doubt the dark matter paradigm. This is entirely conventional – my concern about the viability of dark matter is a contradiction within its own context. It had nothing to do with MOND, which I was blissfully ignorant of when I ran head-long into this problem in 1994.

Published

Galaxies are gravitationally bound condensations of stars and gas in a mostly empty, expanding universe. The tens of billions of solar masses of baryonic material that comprise the stars and gas of the Milky Way now reside mostly within a radius of 20 kpc. At the average density of the universe, the equivalent mass fills a spherical volume with a comoving radius a bit in excess of 1 Mpc.

Published

When we look up at the sky, we see stars. Stars are the building blocks of galaxies; we can see the stellar disk of the galaxy in which we live as the vault of the Milky Way arching across the sky. When we look beyond the Milky Way, we see galaxies. Just as stars are the building blocks of galaxies, galaxies are the building blocks of the universe.

Published

The last post was basically an introduction to this one, which is about the recent work of Pengfei Li. In order to test a theory, we need to establish its prior. What do we expect? The prior for fully formed galaxies after 13 billion years of accretion and evolution is not an easy problem. The dark matter halos need to form first, with the baryonic component assembling afterwards.

Published

In the previous post, I related some of the history of the Radial Acceleration Relation (henceforth RAR). Here I’ll discuss some of my efforts to understand it. I’ve spent more time trying to do this in terms of dark matter than pretty much anything else, but I have not published most of those efforts. As I related briefly in this review, that’s because most of the models I’ve considered are obviously wrong.

Published

The week of June 5, 2017, we held a workshop on dwarf galaxies and the dark matter problem. The workshop was attended by many leaders in the field – giants of dwarf galaxy research. It was held on the campus of Case Western Reserve University and supported by the John Templeton Foundation. It resulted in many fascinating discussions which I can’t possibly begin to share in full here, but I’ll say a few words.