Dark Matter: Understanding Its Nature & Impact on Stars, Planets

[swemy]

If DM is immune to the electromagnetic force but not to gravity and the universe is homogenius, would we expect the find DM at the centre of normal matter bodies such as stars and planets trying to form black holes?

 

[jedishrfu]

Dark matter is not inside of stars or planets since we can measure their mass via their orbital characteristics. Dark resides in the space about these objects. We don't know what it is only that it shows up as it interacts with visible objects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

 

[Chronos]

No. Unlike baryonic matter, DM is collisionless so it does not accumulate in the center of gravitating bodies. It just falls right through and passes out the other side.

 

[jackmell]

The only evidence we have for dark matter is gravitational? Is that all? Just the discrepancy between the mass of objects and their observed gravitational influence? Just seems kind of meager to me, not to mention taking into account the entire history of Astronomy and how we've been duped before in the past. Ptolemy and his epicycles first come to mind. The alternative theories make more sense to me. I hereby bet one dollar I'm right on this one too or is my support of these theories not consistent with the rules of this forum? I don't think so but maybe not.

Oh yeah, ether wind too.

I mean think about it: rather than slightly modify a simple, elementary concept created hundreds of years ago by frail H.sapiens, we'd rather just magically create an entire dark Universe and I personally do not agree with this approach.

 

[swemy]

No. Unlike baryonic matter, DM is collisionless so it does not accumulate in the center of gravitating bodies. It just falls right through and passes out the other side.

So DM contributes to the gravition force, but is not responsive to gravity? The Wiki suggests it clusters in a large ball around galaxies, what if not gravity causes it behave this way?

Or is it that as it falls toward the centre of a body, the accelertion caused by gravity is enough to give it the escape velocity coming out the other side.

 

[marcus]

No. Unlike baryonic matter, DM is collisionless so it does not accumulate in the center of gravitating bodies. It just falls right through and passes out the other side.

So DM contributes to the gravition force, but is not responsive to gravity? The Wiki suggests it clusters in a large ball around galaxies, what if not gravity causes it behave this way?

Or is it that as it falls toward the centre of a body, the accelertion caused by gravity is enough to give it the escape velocity coming out the other side.

No one said that DM is "not responsive to gravity"!
When things fall together they cannot stick together unless they have some way to shed the excess energy.

Ordinary matter when it condenses gets hot and radiates away the excess energy of collision or condensation in the form of heat. DM cannot do this, so it is very interesting to think about how it can gather into clouds!

Clouds of ordinary matter when they collide can get so hot that they even radiate X-rays! Temperatures can get as high as in the interior of stars. We see see some clouds of OM gas by their Xray emission. A great way for OM to dump excess energy, when it is gathering together by the self-gravitation.

DM is certainly "responsive to gravity"! It just is rather limited in its ability to get rid of the excess "falling-together" gravitational energy and this handicap is why it tends to gather only in large clouds.

Maps of DM concentration can be made by measuring optical effect on the backround that we see thru the clouds. Contour density maps. ("weak gravitational lensing") like looking thru ripply glass. Nice technique. Fun-house mirror-like distortion, but by transparent medium, not by reflection. Do you want a link to some of the maps?

The point is that the physics of this type of matter leads to LARGE scale (not small scale) clumping.

It is interesting how DM manages to collect or gather at all! How can it dump enough excess energy to even condense into LARGE clouds?

If you pursue this line of thought you may be curious about this. What mechanism is available to "cool" self-gravitating clouds of DM? then keep on asking questions. Some intriguing stuff here

 

[Drakkith]

I mean think about it: rather than slightly modify a simple, elementary concept created hundreds of years ago by frail H.sapiens, we'd rather just magically create an entire dark Universe and I personally do not agree with this approach.

The modification would require more alterations of current theory than dark matter does.

 

[Chalnoth]

The only evidence we have for dark matter is gravitational? Is that all? Just the discrepancy between the mass of objects and their observed gravitational influence?

The first part is correct. The second is as far from correct as you can possibly get.

The reason why nearly all cosmologists are quite sure dark matter exists is because dark matter behaves quite differently from normal matter. It isn't just a matter of objects appearing heavier than the parts of them we can see. Dark matter doesn't form the same distribution as normal matter, because it is nearly collisionless and cannot lose energy due to friction.

This simple fact causes dark matter to behave very differently from normal matter in a variety of situations, and those situations are all consistent with there being a significant component to the universe which acts very much like a weakly-interacting massive particle.

None of the alternative descriptions of dark matter can match these observations.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also one of the major evidence for dark matter is that it changes the sound of the universe.

Baryons conducts sound very well. So you take the "big boom" that happened with the big bang, and you end up with extremely strong sound waves that makes the universe very "clumpy". It turns out that the universe *isn't* that clumpy and the best explanation that anyone has come up with is that a lot of the universe is made up of stuff that doesn't conduct sound very well. I.e. dark matter.

the magic google term for this is "baryon acoustic oscillations" and if you want to play with how the universe "sounds" different, there is this nice applet

http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/education/cmb_plotter/

 

[bapowell]

The alternative theories make more sense to me.

Which ones? I think you'll find that the alternatives to particulate dark matter face significant shortcomings, and are arguably as, if not more, complex than CDM models.

 

[twofish-quant]

One thing that I have noticed is that a lot of the astrophysicists that are skeptical about dark matter do work in galactic clusters, and looking at their reasoning, they do have a point that there are things about LCDM that don't make sense at the level of galaxy clusters.

However:

1) when we talk about galaxy and cluster formation there are all sorts of complicated things that could happen so that a simple application of LCDM isn't expected to work.
2) LCDM works really, really well for the early universe

The reason for this is that when you talk about the early universe, you are talking about "linear" perturbations and things are pretty simple. As time passes the perturbations grow and by the time you get to now, it's pretty certain that there are very complicated things that cause the "simple linear" model not to work.

So what it looks like to me is that there is some "missing piece" somewhere.

 

[twofish-quant]

Ptolemy and his epicycles first come to mind. The alternative theories make more sense to me. I hereby bet one dollar I'm right on this one too or is my support of these theories not consistent with the rules of this forum?

Hardly. There is an entire cottage industry devoted to writing papers trying to find alternative to dark matter. If you want to discuss peer-reviewed papers that provide alternatives to dark matter, that's fine.

If you go into "conspiracy theories" than that's not.

Oh yeah, ether wind too.

The thing about ether is that we looked for ether and we didn't find it. As far as dark matter, we've seen it. People are putting together maps of dark matter based on gravitational lensing.

I mean think about it: rather than slightly modify a simple, elementary concept created hundreds of years ago by frail H.sapiens, we'd rather just magically create an entire dark Universe and I personally do not agree with this approach.

The trouble is that the simple approaches just do not work. Also it's not a matter of agreement or disagreement. It's a matter of making things fit with the data.

Things that we've seen for hundreds of years are *hard* to modify. A lot of cosmology in fact involves creating "tooth fairy" explanations for the data, but a lot of theory involves figuring out where you can hide a tooth fairy and where you can't. If your explanation is "bigfoot stole my lunch" and you are talking about the Pacific northwest, then maybe its plausible. If your explanation is "bigfoot stole my lunch" and you are talking about Times Square, then it won't work. One problem with tinkering with gravity is that we understand gravity very well, and there are some things that you just can't do with it. Whereas the useful thing about dark matter is that you can invoke it without running into major problems.

Now all of this is very well covered by the literature, I think the one rule that works is "assume that astrophysicists aren't idiots" and if someone believes strongly that X is or is not the case, they have good reasons for it, and not go into conspiracy theories.

 

[twofish-quant]

Which ones? I think you'll find that the alternatives to particulate dark matter face significant shortcomings, and are arguably as, if not more, complex than CDM models.

The major alternative to dark matter are "alternative gravity" models. The one big difference between "alternative gravity" and "dark matter" is that we expect that different parts of the universe have different amounts of dark matter, whereas we expect that even modified gravity should behave the same in different parts of the universe.

So if you see one galaxy behaving very differently than another, "dark matter" has an easy explanation. They have different amounts of dark matter. If you argue that gravity behaves differently in one galaxy than another, people will look at you funny. The big problem with modified gravity models with dark matter, is that no one has come up with a "simple rule" that unifies the behavior of different galaxies, and if you spend two decades looking for something and can't find it, you have to start considering the possibility that it isn't there.

It's hard to tell when you can declare the game over, but I think with dark matter, it's pretty conclusive. Now as far as "dark energy", that's a totally different topic, and there modified gravity models are still in play.

 

[jackmell]

Ok twofish. I appreciate you taking the time to explain that to me so nicely. Seriously. But my understanding is that we do not have sufficient evidence to declare dark matter responsible for the observed discrepancies between mass and gravity:

The most widely accepted explanation for these phenomena is that dark matter exists and that it is most likely[3] composed of heavy particles that interact only through gravity and possibly the weak force; however, alternate explanations have been proposed, and there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to determine which is correct.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter

However I do not wish to derail this thread and perhaps I was wrong to argue aginst it here. Also, I know you guys aren't idiots. I respect and admire all of you. However, I can't ignore we've made many mistakes throughout the history of Astronomy and am skeptical that we just happen to finally have it right in our time.

 

[Chalnoth]

That article is far, far too kind to the possibility that we don't have dark matter. The evidence for dark matter is really, really copious. Now, dark matter might not be as simple as a WIMP, though due to its simplicity that seems the most likely candidate. But the possibility of us merely misunderstanding normal matter, or misunderstanding gravity, has been ruled out pretty conclusively by observation.

 

[jackmell]

The evidence for dark matter is really, really copious.

Ok, thanks for that. We just don't know what it is though from my understanding. That means we would have to discover some new type of matter. Just seems like a tough call to me. I remain skeptical but I'll accept it when we have some empirical evidence for this new substance.

 

[Chalnoth]

Just seems like a tough call to me.

Well, it was. But the science is pretty solid here. The best evidence, I think, is in the cosmic microwave background, which was emitted back before any structures in the universe formed, and as a result its behavior is independent of the messy physics that deals with the formations of galaxies and stars and the like. The physics back before the CMB was emitted were much simpler, and therefore the detection is much cleaner than worrying about the very complicated nearby universe.

And what happened in the early universe was we had a situation where dark matter and normal matter behaved extremely differently, because normal matter experienced pressure, while dark matter did not (because dark matter doesn't interact much with anything, while normal matter at the time was a plasma, and plasmas interact very strongly with light). What we see when we look at the CMB is the imprint of pressure waves, whose effects are most clearly visualized by looking at the power spectrum of the CMB:
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product...nyear/powspectra/images/med/dl7_f01_PPT_M.png

Here you see the power spectrum as measured by WMAP. The first peak represents pressure waves that had just enough time in the early universe to collapse inward, but not enough time to bounce back.

The second peak represents pressure waves that have a smaller wavelength, so that they could oscillate faster, and had just enough time to collapse inward then bounce back. Notice that it is vastly smaller than the first peak. Part of this is because there is an overall decreasing trend to the CMB power spectrum (because our image of it is a little bit blurry). But most of it is because of dark matter: dark matter experiences no pressure and doesn't bounce back.

We know this because of the third peak, which is almost as big as the second. If we were just seeing the overall decreasing trend, then the third peak would be much smaller than the second. But instead it's nearly the same size, because it, like the first peak, also gets a boost from the quantity of dark matter: this peak represents pressure waves with even shorter wavelengths that had enough time to collapse, bounce back, then collapse again. The dark matter just collapsed once and sat there, so its contribution remains.

The power spectrum goes on, to much shorter wavelengths, but WMAP doesn't image those shorter wavelengths very well, though other instruments have. And those other instruments show the same pattern: every even-numbered peak is suppressed compared to its odd-numbered neighbors.

It's pretty much impossible to produce this kind of pattern without a weakly-interacting, low-temperature component of the universe that has substantial mass.

 

[jackmell]

It's pretty much impossible to produce this kind of pattern without a weakly-interacting, low-temperature component of the universe that has substantial mass.

Ok Chalnoth. I just don't understand the science and probably should have just stayed out of this. Unfortunately, I like Astronomy and it's difficult for me to not engage even at the risk of getting into trouble. But also I've become skeptical because the science is so deceptive as history has shown us.

Would be nice to have a better handle on what precisely dark matter consists of.

 

[Drakkith]

Ok Chalnoth. I just don't understand the science and probably should have just stayed out of this. Unfortunately, I like Astronomy and it's difficult for me to not engage even at the risk of getting into trouble. But also I've become skeptical because the science is so deceptive as history has shown us.

What do you mean by "deceptive"? New discoveries happen all the time, but very rarely is something completely wrong or inaccurate to the point that we simply can't use it anymore.

Would be nice to have a better handle on what precisely dark matter consists of.

Absolutely. It's an exciting time in astronomy thanks to mysteries like this!
On a side note, I just visited Kitt Peak National Observatory last night. They showed us the telescope where evidence for dark matter was first gathered by Vera Rubin.

 

[jackmell]

What do you mean by "deceptive"?

I got a big yard. When I stand in the middle, and look all about, it certainly looks flat to me.

Also, they really do look like they're going backwards and forwards across the sky not to mention the big yellow one looks like it's moving across the entire sky each day from east to west. Andromeda looks like a difusse cloud until you have a nice telescope to resolve the detail and then realize the Milky Way is not the entire Universe. I seriously doubt we've reached the limits of that deception:)

On a side note, I just visited Kitt Peak National Observatory last night. They showed us the telescope where evidence for dark matter was first gathered by Vera Rubin.

Nice! I would like to visit Palomar one day.

 

[Chalnoth]

I got a big yard. When I stand in the middle, and look all about, it certainly looks flat to me.

Also, they really do look like they're going backwards and forwards across the sky not to mention the big yellow one looks like it's moving across the entire sky each day from east to west. Andromeda looks like a difusse cloud until you have a nice telescope to resolve the detail and then realize the Milky Way is not the entire Universe. I seriously doubt we've reached the limits of that deception:)

This isn't science being deceptive. This is our own senses. Science is the tool we use to see through the deception of our senses.

 

[Drakkith]

I got a big yard. When I stand in the middle, and look all about, it certainly looks flat to me.

Also, they really do look like they're going backwards and forwards across the sky not to mention the big yellow one looks like it's moving across the entire sky each day from east to west. Andromeda looks like a difusse cloud until you have a nice telescope to resolve the detail and then realize the Milky Way is not the entire Universe. I seriously doubt we've reached the limits of that deception:)

Ah ok, you don't mean deceptive, as that implies that someone has knowingly and willingly mislead you. Perhaps we could say that the "truth" is hidden, that we need to come up with various methods of finding it and figuring out what is true and what isn't.

 

[twofish-quant]

Ok twofish. I appreciate you taking the time to explain that to me so nicely. Seriously. But my understanding is that we do not have sufficient evidence to declare dark matter responsible for the observed discrepancies between mass and gravity

The wikipedia article is very badly worded, and in a few hours, it will be reworded after I change it.

What the paragraph that you quoted is trying to say is that

1) the most likely candidate for dark matter is a weak-interacting massive particle
2) there are other particle alternative candidates for dark matter that are under consideration (sterile neutrinos, axions, shadow gravity, etc.)

So the possible explanations for the differences in observations are

I. Dark matter
Ia. Weak interacting massive particles
Ib. Something other than WIMP's
II. Modified gravity
III. None of the above

Right now the evidence between I and II is overwhelming to I. Now the wikipedia paragraph was trying to point out that there is still a lot of argument between Ia and Ib, and NOT between I and II or III

So I'll change the paragraph to reflect this.

 

[twofish-quant]

That means we would have to discover some new type of matter. Just seems like a tough call to me. I remain skeptical but I'll accept it when we have some empirical evidence for this new substance.

One problem here is that you won't find anything unless you look for it, and you want to get into a situation where "finding nothing" means "finding something".

What people are doing is asking the question "if dark matter exists, what are its properties." At that point you go up to various people with money (i.e. DOE and the NSF) and say "we want to build this device that looks for dark matter with properties X, Y, and Z."

http://www.particle.kth.se/5A5461/DarkMatter.pdf
http://www1.jinr.ru/Pepan/v-42-4/13_rau.pdf

The thing about spending several tens of millions of dollars looking for dark matter is that you have to assume that it exists in order to show that it doesn't. You assume that dark matter exists,
and then you build machines to look for it. If those machines turn up empty, then you end up with an interesting mystery and go back and look at what we got wrong. We are already at the point where we can rule out certain types of dark matter, and the list of hundreds of candidates is now down to about six or seven. If we get ourselves to one candidate, that would be cool. If we get ourselves down to *zero* candidates, then that would be even weirder.

If you come up with a much more convincing explanation of galaxy rotation than dark matter then there is no real point in looking for it on earth. These experiments are expensive, so if we are pretty sure that dark matter isn't there, there is no point in spending tens of millions of dollars looking for it especially since we aren't sure what we are looking for.

 

[twofish-quant]

I got a big yard. When I stand in the middle, and look all about, it certainly looks flat to me.

Look more closely. Also, put some numbers to it.

Whenever I teach introductory astronomy, I want to get people to *think* like scientists, and I ask questions like this.

You are in your back yard. Suddenly UFO's appear and you get knocked out. You wake up on your backyard, but there is a force field that keeps you from leaving your backyard. You are interested in knowing if you are still on Earth or if you are in some holodeck in a spaceship. How do you tell?

The reason I like these sorts of questions is that I don't know the answer, and invariably someone will come up with something that I didn't think of.

Also we are in a pretty similar situation with the universe. The measurements of the universe indicate that we are in a flat universe, but it makes a big difference if it's really flat or if our measurements aren't good enough.

Also, they really do look like they're going backwards and forwards across the sky not to mention the big yellow one looks like it's moving across the entire sky each day from east to west. Andromeda looks like a difusse cloud until you have a nice telescope to resolve the detail and then realize the Milky Way is not the entire Universe. I seriously doubt we've reached the limits of that deception:)

Sure, and science history is important because you can pinpoint the exact moment in which people realized that their view of the universe was wrong, and what was the exact observation that changed things. The last time this happened was in the late-1990's, when people realized that the universe was accelerating.

One pretty cool thing is that people have known for thousands of years that the world was round. A lot depends on how big your back yard is, but it doesn't take a huge plot of land to realize that something is odd. Surveyors have to take into account the curvature of the earth.

 

[ImaLooser]

Ok Chalnoth. I just don't understand the science and probably should have just stayed out of this. Unfortunately, I like Astronomy and it's difficult for me to not engage even at the risk of getting into trouble. But also I've become skeptical because the science is so deceptive as history has shown us.

Would be nice to have a better handle on what precisely dark matter consists of.

There are galaxies which are colliding. The bright matter from each galaxy interacts and slows down. The dark matter does not, it doesn't interact and so keeps moving unaffected. In this way the dark matter has separated from the bright, which is unusual. So there is an area in space which appears empty, but nevertheless bends light via its gravitation. This is what astronomers call "direct evidence" of dark matter, which is sciencespeak for "as direct as we astronomers can hope to get."

As to what dark matter consists of, that could easily take decades to figure out.

 

[Chalnoth]

There are galaxies which are colliding. The bright matter from each galaxy interacts and slows down. The dark matter does not, it doesn't interact and so keeps moving unaffected. In this way the dark matter has separated from the bright, which is unusual. So there is an area in space which appears empty, but nevertheless bends light via its gravitation. This is what astronomers call "direct evidence" of dark matter, which is sciencespeak for "as direct as we astronomers can hope to get."

As to what dark matter consists of, that could easily take decades to figure out.

Sort of. I don't think this effect has been detected on the level of individual galaxy collisions. At least, not yet.

It's galaxy clusters that we've seen this effect in, where the hot x-ray gas that permeates the clusters, and makes up approximately 90% of the visible mass in the clusters, that collides and slows down in such collisions.