3 ms·
No, it would speed past the center until losing moment on the surface of the other side of the planet, and oscillate back and forth. Because there's no "frictio
by openasocket 10y ago
No, it would speed past the center until losing moment on the surface of the other side of the planet, and oscillate back and forth. Because there's no "friction" slowing down the dark matter it will continue like this forever, by conservation of energy.
Check out http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/214950/if-dark-matter-only-interacts-with-gravity-why-doesnt-it-all-clump-together-in http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/214950/if-dark-ma...
- BurningFrog 10y agoAha, DM particles are in eternal orbits! Thanks!
- TheDauthi 10y agoWouldn't it -very- slowly lose energy due to gravitational radiation?
- wyager 10y agoIf the cloud was inhomogeneous, yes. However, (unless I am mistaken, which is fairly likely,) the more symmetric a bulk collection of particles (such as WIMPs), the less gravitational radiation it would emit as it oscillated. In particular, for every particle falling in from one side of the planet, you have another particle falling in from the other side of the planet, so the mass distribution of the system does not change over time. I don't know how gravetomagnetic effects would come into play.
- grkvlt 10y ago> speed past the center What caused these particles to accelerate up to the speeds they are at in the first place, then? Something must be interacting with them quite significantly if they have non-zero velocity?
- openasocket 10y agothe force of gravity
- gus_massa 10y agoGravity. Actually, almost the only thing that we know about dark mater is that gravity affect it. (Actually, we only know that there is something that is making a gravitational pull of normal mater, and we call this mysterious thing "dark mater".)