> basically only gravity and not EM or other forces
I don't understand how physicists make any sense of this in any kind of theory. If you had enough dark matter sitting in some spot that could turn into a star, suddenly the claim is any ordinary matter around it would stay near absolute zero no matter how much nuclear fusion was going on at the same spot? How does that work? Or would dark matter just somehow resist even interacting with itself to create friction, etc.?
> If you had enough dark matter sitting in some spot that could turn into a star, suddenly the claim is any ordinary matter around it would stay near absolute zero no matter how much nuclear fusion was going on at the same spot?
You can't. Because becoming a star (initiating nuclear fusion) requires nongravitational interaction between nucleons, which are normal, not dark, matter.
IIUC, If it interacts with itself through other forces, they can't be through the forces that act on normal matter (which they would interact with if that was the case), including the forces involved in nuclear fusion. They'd have to be dark matter exclusive forces.
Interesting, thanks. So what's preventing "dark matter" from simply being, say, lots of photons traveling through intergalactic space then? That seems like the next obvious candidate after ordinary matter.
If dark matter where a lot of photons, then we could detect it. For example the experiments to detect the cosmic microwave background radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background can detect a very small amount of light that is the leftover of the radiation produced soon after the big bang. We have very good estimations of how many photons are out there.
I don't understand, how would you detect photons that are going in a direction orthogonal to you in intergalactic space? They have to be coming toward you for you to detect them, right?
An implicit assumption is that the universe is isotropic and homogenous at that scale. Meaning, it looks the same from any point and any direction.
So you might not detect photons in one particular direction, but we should assume that they should be going in all directions. Otherwise that theory is just moving the goal from "where's this energy" to "why is it pointing towards that".
CMB is consistent with, every direction is the same, so you would have to say "photons are going everywhere in this range, but towards that in this segment of the spectrum".
But isn't it a hell of a lot less of a stretch to imagine there are more photons in other parts of the universe than here, than to imagine there is some sort of mysterious dark matter permeating all of the universe? If we're going to be unable to interact with whatever dark matter is to test may hypothesis, we might as well propose the hypothesis that requires the least radical changes to our fundamental theories of physics, no?
Assume have an equation like `Energy = 0`, where `Energy = Mass + Photons`. It works great for almost everything, we can get the curvature of space by `f(Energy)` where `f(Photons) = 0`.
However there's this one experiment that says the answer is `Energy = 42`. `f(x)` is still useful, everything else works.
We can just amend the equation to be: `Energy = Mass + Photons + DarkMatter` where `DarkMatter = -42` and `f(DarkMatter) = 0`.
Or we can keep the E=M+P but change the way f works to be: `f(Photons, X) = Y` where for almost any value `f(Photons, X') = 0` and in this one case `f(Photons, X") = 42`.
To me it's clear that the first approach is less complicated. The first approach raises one question, "why -42?" The second approach raises "why does X?" exist and "why 42?"
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By the way, you are mistaken, we do interact with Dark Matter, that's how we detected it (Bullet Cluster). Gravity does interact with it.
Well I read [1] [2] that they do have gravity... which is probably a more direct answer to what you're asking. I'm not sure what counts as "mass" for a photon per se, except that I assume there's an effective mass via the energy.
not exactly. As photons are constantly moving at the speed of light (citing the theory of relativity I don't really understand) they have no resting mass. But they have an impuls and create a force of impact (used in sun sails) from which a theoretical notion of ... mass (kinetic, perhaps?) can be derived. I'd like to know how it's derived originally, too though.
edit: if E=mc² with E(photon)=f•h and f=c/λ, then m=h/(λc) in vacuum. ... I hope that's correct. What's interesting, [m]=J/[a]/m
normally, people don't discuss mass. rather they are simply heavy. most don't even really care why. and those who do, conflate the idea with weight often enough.
We don't know much about what it does do, only what it doesn't do. Scientists have deduced its existence by measuring the speed of the expansion of the universe and determining that the mass that we can see based on the rotation of galaxies, etc. can not account for the speed of the expansion. There should be way more mass out there than there is.
We also know that it doesn't seem to react with light otherwise it would block out the stars from other galaxies as well as the cosmic background radiation. It's difficult to tell how it reacts with ordinary matter because we can't see it, but the assumption is that, since its got such a large gravitational effect, it must not react much at all otherwise it would dominate everything visible since it's 90% of the matter in the known universe.
It's difficult to make sense of what this means, but all of the other theories that explain the rotation of galaxies and the expansion of the universe don't fit very well either.
Just a clarification: galaxy rotation curves and the observed expansion of the universe are not really related.
The empirically observed expansion of the Universe is the motivating evidence for the existence of Dark Energy. Dark Matter, which is motivated (in part) by the inconsistencies in the rotation curves of galaxies is a separate topic. Despite sharing similarities in their names and the fact that they make up the two biggest chunks of energy/mass in the Universe, Dark Energy and Dark Matter are not actually related. The word 'dark' is really just implying that we have not yet observed anything to explain these two phenomenon.
A star begins as a huge lump of gravitationally bound gas. This gas runs into each other, that's how it has pressure and temperature, even when it is as diffuse as a proto-stellar nebula is (which can be on the order of tens to hundreds of atoms per cubic centimeter). The nebula goes through cycles of compression and radiation, as the gas collapses due to gravitation it heats up, raising the pressure and halting the collapse. But then the heat is radiated away and the gas cools, and then it continues to collapse. This process takes a chunk of gas that is on the order of a light-year across and follows it down and down and down as it contracts to the size of a solar system then to the size of a star. Over time the globule gets denser and denser, and thus the force of gravity pulling matter down toward the center gets stronger and stronger. Which means that the amount of pressure necessary to counteract that pull gets higher and higher, and thus the temperature of the proto-star as it collapses goes up. Stars are born hot and bright, even before conditions in their core are hot enough to ignite fusion reactions. Which is the inevitable result of a mass of gas that is dense enough to undergo collapse and is massive enough to result in a body that is over about 75 times the mass of Jupiter (the lower limit of a red dwarf star). It is the energy from those fusion reactions which provide the temperature and pressure increases which ultimately halt further gravitational collapse.
That's how stars are formed.
Absolutely none of this is applicable to dark matter. Dark matter isn't made up of atoms, it doesn't bump into and bounce off of other particles of matter. It doesn't maintain a temperature and pressure the way a gas does. Dark matter interacts extremely weakly. Neutrinos are an example of dark matter, but a type that we know doesn't make up most of the mass of dark matter in the Universe. A neutrino will pass through a chunk of lead a light year thick and then only have a 50/50 chance of being stopped. Dark matter is even more weakly interacting (with ordinary matter and itself). Particles of dark matter are zooming about in orbits around the center of mass of our galaxy. They zip through almost everything they touch without interacting, the exception being black holes, which they simply fall into like everything else, of course. They are like an enormous parade of ghosts that can only interact with other matter through gravitation, meaning orbital dynamics. Because of this they have no way of condensing into forms of higher density like nebulae, stars, or planets.
Imagine a giant ball of yarn larger than our galaxy, except each thread is a flow, a river of huge numbers of ghostly dark matter particles. Except there are many balls of yarn overlayed on top of one another and many flows going through any one point, since they don't interact with each other. Some are traveling around in orbits around the Milky Way in the same direction as our Solar System, some are going the opposite way, some are in orbits at various inclinations to the galactic plane, some are in circular orbits, some are in eccentric orbits and the part of the galaxy where we are is their highest distance from the galactic center, for others it's the closest distance to the galactic center, and so on. All of these flows, this ghostly wind of insubstantial but massive dark matter particles is what together makes up the "dark matter halo" around our galaxy and around typical galaxies. In any given section of the galaxy, say a typical cubic light year, the total amount of dark matter isn't that great, it's vastly lower than the mass of any star that would happen to be there, for example. But the dark matter is everywhere, it flows throughout a region that extends well beyond the edge of the visible galaxy, and it has roughly the same density everywhere, so over huge volumes that mass adds up, and up, and up, and turns out to be, in aggregate, greater than the mass of all of the ordinary matter in our galaxy, by a factor of about 5:1.
How seriously taken are theories that posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions as an explanation for dark matter? E.g. dark matter could be "ordinary" matter but separated from our 3 spatial dimensions by a discrete spatial dimension or dimensions.
Friction, and really any kind of 'contact' between things is just electrons repelling. Some ideas for dark matter don't interact in any way other than gravity, so your idea is pretty mainstream on that, but there's basically no evidence that dark matter exists in some specific form, and in fact every experiment seems to constrain the possible forms it could have more and more. It's still possible it exists, but I would suspect that whatever the explanation is for the 'missing' matter will be pretty revolutionary.
I don't understand how physicists make any sense of this in any kind of theory. If you had enough dark matter sitting in some spot that could turn into a star, suddenly the claim is any ordinary matter around it would stay near absolute zero no matter how much nuclear fusion was going on at the same spot? How does that work? Or would dark matter just somehow resist even interacting with itself to create friction, etc.?