The end of Dark Matter?

[Dubious Dick]

Recent reports indicate a vast number more red dwarfs now detectable, and with them a large number of new planets are likely to be detected. The suggestion (and forgive me for not providing a source) is that this may mean the end of dark matter.

Any thoughts? As a non-phys, I am clearly not qualified to comment except to say that I was alsways disturbed by the whole dark matter theory anyway. Always seemed to me that it was weak in that it appeared to be a sort of makeweight theory. Even a bit desperate. In my uneducated way I always thought tha since we had apparently not reached anything that could plausibly be described as the outer extemities of space and time, then there had to be more stuff out there that would more obviously be the source of all that unexplained gravity?

[brianp]

Recent reports indicate a vast number more red dwarfs now detectable, and with them a large number of new planets are likely to be detected. The suggestion (and forgive me for not providing a source) is that this may mean the end of dark matter.

See http://blogcritics.org/scitech/artic...d-dark-matter/

[Dubious Dick]

See http://blogcritics.org/scitech/artic...d-dark-matter/

Thanks Brian. Though appears in a comment to the article that some feel even this much new stuff is not enough. Surely the answer is still more likely to be that there is more still to be found?

[brianp]

Thanks Brian. Though appears in a comment to the article that some feel even this much new stuff is not enough. Surely the answer is still more likely to be that there is more still to be found?

It will be fascinating to see what others in the field make of this finding - any conclusions we laymen reach on the basis of one newspaper report are likely to be very wide of the mark.

It's proving to be an interesting week - the likelihood of many more planets than thought, orders of magnitude more, 'out there', and the discovery that some bacteria can survive quite happily with arsenic replacing phosphorus in their DNA and cell membranes. So life (as we know it) is even more versatile than thought and there many more places in the universe where it may have taken hold.

[Tony Williams]

Indeed - I am inclined to think that life of some kind will be very common throughout the universe, even if "it isn't life as we know it, Jim".

On the other hand, if you look at the very slow and patchy development of life on Earth and the conditions which seem to have been necessary for this, I'm also of the opinion that multicellular life will probably be far rarer, large animals far rarer still, intelligence far rarer still, and technological civilisations very few and far (in terms of both distance and time) between, and possibly not lasting all that long.

I explore these issues in this web article: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/Fermi.htm

[ZERO]

I always thought there were more small things than big things. For example, our solar system has one star but several planets and a multitude of asteroids and comets.
If this is true across the universe then there would be a lot of large gas balls that did not quite make it big enough to become a star. Perhaps several for each star that does make it.
These would have a lot of mass in a small area so would not stop background light but could account for a lot of unexplained mass without being large enough to be visible like a nebula.

[chaggle]

Indeed - I am inclined to think that life of some kind will be very common throughout the universe, even if "it isn't life as we know it, Jim".

On the other hand, if you look at the very slow and patchy development of life on Earth and the conditions which seem to have been necessary for this, I'm also of the opinion that multicellular life will probably be far rarer, large animals far rarer still, intelligence far rarer still, and technological civilisations very few and far (in terms of both distance and time) between, and possibly not lasting all that long.

I explore these issues in this web article: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/Fermi.htm

I agree, probably only a few hundred or thousand years depending upon how you define 'technological'.