HST and 'dark matter' Options

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

ASA Updates Plans for Hubble 'Ring Of Dark Matter' Briefing

GREENBELT, Md. - NASA will hold a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on May 15 to discuss the strongest evidence to date that dark matter exists. This evidence was found in a ghostly ring of dark matter in the cluster CL0024+17, discovered using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The ring is the first detection of dark matter with a unique structure different from the distribution of both the galaxies and the hot gas in the cluster. The discovery will be featured in the June 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

[Mongo]

Dark Matter gone missing in many places: a crisis of modern physics?

This week, two additional studies report that even more seems to be missing (when your expectations are based on what LCDM predicts, that is). They both point at a serious lack in the amount of expected dark matter on two very different size-scales: the local universe and our immediate neighborhood within the Milky Way.

In the work titled "Missing Dark Matter in the Local Universe", Igor D. Karachentsev has looked at a sample of 11,000 galaxies in the local Universe around the MW. He has summed up the masses of individual galaxies and galaxy-groups and used this to test a very fundamental prediction of LCDM.

The idea is as simple as it is brilliant: cosmology has precise predictions as to what is the content of our universe. In particular, it predicts the density of matter to be Ωm,glob = 0.28 +- 0.03 (83 per cent of this in dark, 17 per cent in luminous matter). Now, to test this, all you have to do is to sum up all the mass within a certain volume of space, and you can estimate the actual density of mass within that volume. To be sure that your volume is representative, it needs to be large. If you only sum over, say, a sphere of 100 kpc in diameter, the density strongly depends on whether you have a galaxy in this volume or not. Karachentsev chose to use a volume of 50 Mpc around the MW. On this size-scale, the density is expected to fluctuate by only 10 percent, a reasonably low value in astronomy. The scale can thus be assumed to be representative and you should observe the mass density predicted by LCDM.

Except that you do not.

Karachentsev reports that the average mass density is only Ωm,loc = 0.08 +- 0.02, a factor of 3-4 lower than predicted and can not be explained by the uncertainties in the data or prediction. As most of the mass-content in the Universe is supposed to be dark matter, this means that most dark matter is missing in this volume.

<snip>

Indeed, a 50 page review of the observational tests of the standard model has been compiled by Pavel Kroupa in "The dark matter crisis: falsification of the current standard model of cosmology" and will appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA-CSIRO publishing). Using a huge number of different data, Pavel Kroupa performs a strict logical falsification of the currently standard cosmological model, which is based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, concluding that cold or warm dark matter cannot exist.

Not surprising then, that the above studies have found dark matter to be missing....