Big galaxies at high redshift! That’s my prediction, anyway. A little context first. New Year, New Telescope First, JWST finally launched. This has been a long-delayed NASA mission; the launch had been put off so many times it felt like a living example of Zeno’s paradox: ever closer but never quite there.
Last time, I expressed despondency about the lack of progress due to attitudes that in many ways remain firmly entrenched in the 1980s. Recently a nice result has appeared, so maybe there is some hope.
I have become despondent for the progress of science. Despite enormous progress both observational and computational, we have made little progress in solving the missing mass problem. The issue is not one of technical progress. It is psychological. Words matter. We are hung up on missing mass as literal dark matter.
It often happens that data are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. The evidence for dark matter is an obvious example. I frequently hear permutations on the statement This is said in all earnestness by serious scientists who clearly believe what they say.
Reality check Before we can agree on the interpretation of a set of facts, we have to agree on what those facts are. Even if we agree on the facts, we can differ about their interpretation. It is OK to disagree, and anyone who practices astrophysics is going to be wrong from time to time. It is the inevitable risk we take in trying to understand a universe that is vast beyond human comprehension.
Mass is a basic quantity. How much stuff does an astronomical object contain?
A common objection to MOND is that it does not entirely reconcile the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies. This can be seen as an offset in the acceleration scale between individual galaxies and clusters.
The following is a guest post by Indranil Banik, Moritz Haslbauer, and Pavel Kroupa (bios at end) based on their new paper Modifying gravity to save cosmology Cosmology is currently in a major crisis because of many severe tensions, the most serious and well-known being that local observations of how quickly the Universe is expanding (the so-called ‘Hubble constant’) exceed the prediction of the standard cosmological
I have been busy teaching cosmology this semester. When I started on the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1998, there was no advanced course on the subject. This seemed like an obvious hole to fill, so I developed one.
The missing mass problem has been with us many decades now. Going on a century if you start counting from the work of Oort and Zwicky in the 1930s. Not quite a half a century if we date it from the 1970s when most of the relevant scientific community started to take it seriously. Either way, that’s a very long time for a major problem to go unsolved in physics.
