{"id":8316,"date":"2012-05-23T10:46:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T17:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=8316"},"modified":"2015-07-07T10:56:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-07T17:56:15","slug":"dark-matter-still-existing-one-in-a-continuing-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/23\/dark-matter-still-existing-one-in-a-continuing-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Matter: Still Existing (One in a Continuing Series)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month we mentioned<\/a> a paper on the arxiv<\/a> that made a provocative claim: evidence from the dynamics of stars above the galactic disk indicates that there is essentially no dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun. I am not an expert on galactic dynamics, but nevertheless I and others were immediately skeptical, especially since there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of dark matter from other measurements. Skeptics, of course, happily piled on. But this isn’t an area where one opinion or the other matters very much — better data and better analysis is what matters.<\/p>\n

Now we have a better analysis, from people who are experts: Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine have a paper<\/a> in which they examine the claim closely. They find it wanting. This was pointed out here in a comment by Ben<\/a>; Jester<\/a> and Peter Coles<\/a> also have useful blog posts up about it.<\/p>\n

Short version: the original authors made assumptions about the distribution of velocities of the stars they were looking at, and those assumptions are known to be wrong. Using a better model (i.e., one more compatible with known data), Bovy and Tremaine show that the observations are perfectly consistent with the conventionally-assumed dark matter density. The good news is that they are actually able to use this technique to get a more precise measurement of that density than was previously available. It’s a rare scientific lemon that can’t be turned into at least a little bit of lemonade.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why people get so emotional about dark matter. The original paper here by Bidin et al. was accompanied by a dramatic press release<\/a> from the European Southern Observatory. I am known as a “dark matter supporter,” but I have no personal investment; I think it would be much cooler if something crazy were going on with gravity. But that’s not what the data indicate. It’s just some new particle we haven’t yet made in the lab, hardly the end of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month we mentioned a paper on the arxiv that made a provocative claim: evidence from the dynamics of stars above the galactic disk indicates that there is essentially no dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun. I am not an expert on galactic dynamics, but nevertheless I and others were immediately skeptical, especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12522,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8316\/revisions\/12522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}