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50 votes
8 answers
7k views

Why isn't dark matter just ordinary matter?

There's more gravitational force in our galaxy (and others) than can be explained by counting stars made of ordinary matter. So why not lots of dark planetary systems (i.e., without stars) made of ...
Andrew Beatty's user avatar
54 votes
4 answers
14k views

How do we know Dark Matter isn't simply Neutrinos?

What evidence is there that dark matter isn't one of the known types of neutrinos? If it were, how would this be measurable?
ripper234's user avatar
  • 705
56 votes
4 answers
4k views

Are modified theories of gravity credible?

I'm a statistician with a little training in physics and would just like to know the general consensus on a few things. I'm reading a book by John Moffat which basically tries to state how GR makes ...
dcl's user avatar
  • 673
28 votes
4 answers
6k views

How did the universe shift from "dark matter dominated" to "dark energy dominated"?

In order to get dark energy to dominate, wouldn't you first need another form of energy to push the expansion until dark energy could dominate? Otherwise I don't understand how the universe could ...
user43783's user avatar
  • 1,137
22 votes
2 answers
3k views

Why are neutrinos ruled out as a major (or even sole) component of dark matter?

A number of times I have encountered in text-books and articles that neutrinos might contribute only a small fraction to dark matter. The reason has to do with the fact that if all of the dark matter ...
ThisGuy's user avatar
  • 547
19 votes
5 answers
5k views

Dark matter and dark energy references

I've been looking for questions about dark matter, and I've read some very interesting answers. However, I desire too look into it deeply. This is not actually a question. I'm asking the community ...
10 votes
2 answers
1k views

Dark Matter vs Modified Gravity

Why do cosmologists and astrophysicists assume that the reason for the higher velocities of outer stars in galaxies is due to matter at all? The name dark matter seems misleading. Couldn't gravity ...
Noon36's user avatar
  • 168
1 vote
2 answers
418 views

Possibility of making dark energy equivalent with dark matter

I was curious whether it is possible to make dark energy equivalent to dark matter. Can this unification be done? If it can, why do scientists prefer to separate dark energy from dark matter?
quantum beginner's user avatar
29 votes
3 answers
10k views

How do people calculate proportions of dark matter, dark energy and baryonic matter of the universe?

The Wikipedia page on dark matter mentions that the Planck mission had revealed that in our universe ordinary baryonic matter, dark matter and dark energy are present in the ratio: 4.9%, 26.8% and 68....
curious's user avatar
  • 1,057
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

Dark matter and dark energy [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Dark matter references I have recently read about dark matter and dark energy, and why physicists think it must exist (dark matter: mass of galaxies are far bigger than ...
user14445's user avatar
  • 1,503
23 votes
1 answer
9k views

How do we know Dark Matter is non-baryonic? [duplicate]

It seems widely stated, but not thoroughly explained, that Dark Matter is not normal matter as we understand it. Wikipedia states "Consistency with other observations indicates that the vast majority ...
Ehryk's user avatar
  • 3,241
20 votes
3 answers
1k views

Why hasn't warm dark matter replaced cold dark matter as the standard model of cosmology?

The $\Lambda\rm CDM$ (cold dark matter with cosmological constant) is the current standard model of cosmology because the model comes with a long list of phenomena successfully explained by it. ...
Kyle Oman's user avatar
  • 18.5k
14 votes
3 answers
5k views

How did we 'discover' dark matter? [closed]

I'm an astrophysics student and I've been researching this topic and there is one point that keeps eluding me. How did the scientific community realize that there had to be dark matter in the ...
ManoTech's user avatar
  • 508
11 votes
2 answers
547 views

If neutrinos are disfavoured as DM candidates why aren't axions?

Numerical simulations of observed large-scale structure formation work best with Cold Dark Matter (CDM; see the answer here). Neutrinos are candidates for Hot Dark Matter (HDM), and hence they cannot ...
SRS's user avatar
  • 26.8k
9 votes
6 answers
5k views

Why can't "missing mass" (=dark matter) be photons?

After a star lives and dies, I assume virtually all of its mass would be photons. If enough stars have already lived and died, couldn’t there be enough photon energy out there to account for all ...
Tom Fangrow's user avatar

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