{"id":80108,"date":"2018-06-28T13:02:21","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T20:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/dark-matter-test-will-either-prove-its-existence-or-modify-gravity"},"modified":"2018-06-30T15:00:56","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T22:00:56","slug":"dark-matter-test-will-either-prove-its-existence-or-modify-gravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/dark-matter-test-will-either-prove-its-existence-or-modify-gravity","title":{"rendered":"Dark Matter \u2018Test\u2019 Will Either Prove Its Existence or Modify Gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For something that supposedly takes up 80 percent of the total mass of the universe, we don\u2019t know a whole lot about dark matter<\/a>. Sometimes the lightless stuff reveals hints about its shape<\/a>; other times it completely thwarts<\/a> any evidence supporting its existence. Since we can\u2019t observe it first-hand, we rely on indirect means to suss out information about it, like watching the interactions between other forms of matter. Now, scientists have developed a new \u201ctest\u201d to make those investigations more definitive, leading us closer to answering the question: Is dark matter even real<\/a>? And if it\u2019s not, then is everything we know about gravity<\/a> wrong?<\/p>\n

In a study<\/a>, published Monday in Physical Review Letters<\/em>, a team of scientists from the University of Bonn that also includes Hubble Fellow Marcel S. Pawlowski, Ph.D.<\/a> of the University of California, Irvine, introduce a computer model that can simulate how certain small galaxies should<\/em> move if dark matter exists. Though dark matter does not absorb or emit light, it still interacts with visible matter through gravity, so it\u2019s expected to make the stars around galaxies move in specific ways.<\/p>\n

Pawlowski explains to Inverse<\/em> in an email that within the little galaxies in question \u2014 satellite \u201cdwarf\u201d galaxies, crowding around the edges of big galaxies like the Milky Way<\/a> \u2014 the acceleration of stars speeding around the galaxy\u2019s center is described by a term called the radial acceleration relation, or RAR. \u201cWith the new study, we simulate such dwarf galaxies under the assumption of the \u2018standard\u2019 dark matter model, [to] determine what kind of behavior would be expected for the dwarfs,\u201d he says. \u201cWe find that the simulated dwarf galaxies largely continue the RAR to lower accelerations.\u201d Now that they know how those dwarf galaxies are supposed<\/em> to move if dark matter exists, they can compare the simulations to real-life data on the movement of those galaxies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For something that supposedly takes up 80 percent of the total mass of the universe, we don\u2019t know a whole lot about dark matter. Sometimes the lightless stuff reveals hints about its shape; other times it completely thwarts any evidence supporting its existence. Since we can\u2019t observe it first-hand, we rely on indirect means to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80205,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80108\/revisions\/80205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}