{"id":87277,"date":"2019-01-31T16:22:37","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T00:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/dark-matter-may-not-actually-exist-and-our-alternative-theory-can-be-put-to-the-test"},"modified":"2019-01-31T16:22:37","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T00:22:37","slug":"dark-matter-may-not-actually-exist-and-our-alternative-theory-can-be-put-to-the-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/dark-matter-may-not-actually-exist-and-our-alternative-theory-can-be-put-to-the-test","title":{"rendered":"Dark matter may not actually exist \u2013 and our alternative theory can be put to the test"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Scientists have been searching for \u201cdark matter\u201d \u2013 an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe \u2013 for nearly a century. The reason for this persistence is that dark matter is needed to account for the fact that galaxies don\u2019t seem to obey the fundamental laws of physics. However, dark matter searches have remained unsuccessful.<\/p>\n

But there are other approaches to make sense of why galaxies<\/a> behave so strangely. Our new study, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics<\/a>, shows that, by tweaking the laws of gravity on the enormous scales of galaxies, we may not actually need dark matter<\/a> after all.<\/p>\n

The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky<\/a> discovered in the 1930s that velocities in galaxy clusters were too high to account for how much matter we could see. A similar phenomenon was described by several groups of astronomers, such as Vera Rubin<\/a> and Kent Ford<\/a>, when they studied the motion of stars at the far edges of the Andromeda Galaxy.<\/p>\n

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

Scientists have been searching for \u201cdark matter\u201d \u2013 an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe \u2013 for nearly a century. The reason for this persistence is that dark matter is needed to account for the fact that galaxies don\u2019t seem to obey the fundamental laws [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87277","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\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}