4 ms·

The galaxy's dark matter is largely rotating with the bulk of the visible galaxy. However, the solar system's peculiar motion through the dark matter (DM[a]) d

The galaxy's dark matter is largely rotating with the bulk of the visible galaxy. However, the solar system's peculiar motion through the dark matter (DM[a]) does perturb the DM, and some DM will entrain to solar system objects (mostly the sun) leading to small overdensities. However, remember that within the orbit of Neptune there is only about ten Phobos-masses worth of dark matter, or barely more than Jupiter's small moons Lysithea (disc. 1938) or Sinope (disc. 1914, until 2000 the outermost known moon of Jupiter). Moreover, Jupiter can't really gravitationally entrain anything beyond 0.35 astronomical units away from it (otherwise the sun dominates), and gas (whether dark matter or electrically neutral atoms or light molecules[b]) is too low-mass to be drawn into a orbit around Jupiter with such a small radius. There is likely a small overdensity of DM within the sun, but that's really a focusing of dark matter gas through gravitational lensing rather than dark matter gas staying trapped within the sun. It may help understanding if you hold the sun stationary and blow a wind of dark matter gas past (and through) it -- the gravitation of the sun pinches some of the gas inwards. Since on timescales of small numbers of years the sun has roughly constant velocity against the gas (or the wind blows with constant strength from a constant direction), the pinched wind is at a constant location and constant density deep within the sun. Whether any of the less-massive bodies of the solar system have overdensities within them (or possibly tails[1]) depends on the mass of dark matter particles, and right now that's not well-enough constrained to answer with any confidence. - -- [a] here I mean specifically cold dark matter (from the standard cosmology) rather than neutrinos. Solar neutrinos and (relativistic) neutrinos from far away sources are "hot" and so run away from the galaxy too quickly to account for much of its non-visible mass; cosmic neutrinos (the neutrino analogue of the cosmic microwave background) are cold and dark, but individually they're too low-mass to form galaxy or even galaxy-cluster size halos. The total mass of the cosmic neutrino background is also small. [b] of course, ionization of neutral atoms and gas molecules is pretty likely in the solar system, and Jupiter has an enormous magnetotail. Dark matter doesn't feel magnetism (and isn't ionized by UV or X-rays), otherwise it wouldn't be dark. So while gases can be drawn around Jupiter electromagnetically, dark matter cannot. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/earth-might-have-hairy-dark-matter https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/earth-might-have-hairy-dark...

JProthero 8y ago
What do you think of the possibility of 'dark sector' interactions?[1] The idea that dark matter might consist of a class of self-interacting particles, and that we might be embedded in a universe full of hidden phenomena as rich as the ordinary-matter phenomena that are visible to us (e.g. dark 'planets', dark 'stars', dark 'galaxies', or something very different) was always intriguing to me, but it seems that a consensus is emerging, based on observations of large-scale distribution, that dark matter is dominated by a single type of particle incapable of self-interaction. Is it still possible that some fraction of the dark matter in the universe is self-interacting, capable of 'clumping' and exhibiting physics similar to ordinary condensed matter, or are all the indications now pointing strongly towards a single non self-interacting particle? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_photon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_photon
- raattgift 8y ago
  > What do you think of the possibility of 'dark sector' interactions? It remains a possibility. It does not seem to be required by observation, though. Worse, if you move away from parsimonious non-interacting quantum field theories to more complex models, you have to suppress a lot of symmetries that inevitably produce observables which are not seen. Most people working with general relativity just use non-interacting scalar fields, but specific ideas about dark matter have to consider the ins and outs of gauge theory (e.g. does DM only feel gravitons and Higgs or does it also feel one or more of the other non-photon gauge bosons? if it feels the weak force, what goes on at electroweak scales? and so on...). The microscopic details of the microscopic alternatives within the broad family of QFT dark matter get hairy quickly, and there's very little astrophysical evidence to prefer one over the other (people favour axions or sterile neutrinos for reasons from within particle physics, and are looking for such things to complete their extensions to the standard model, they have to be very weakly interacting for particle-physics-in-laboratories reasons, but oh by the way as a side effect dark matter could be wholly or at least partially these proposed standard-model-problem-slaying particles). > [what if we propose dark photons, dark atoms, etc.?] One problem you run into is that if you can form composite dark particles analogous to atoms, or dark molecules, what prevents them from forming larger structures that collapse gravitationally? Likewise, if you can emit dark photons, you're removing momentum-energy from a particle in an orbit, and you would then expect the particle to fall into a closer orbit. Again, how do you prevent gravitational collapse? You might fix that by feeding back (squash DM together in galactic cores, release enormous "dark shine" dark-photon-analogues which then kick the massive DM particles into wider orbits, but it's like balancing a pencil on its tip; this is called DMAF (dark matter annihilation feedback), and is speculative. On the other hand baryon-flow feedback is a thing in solving e.g. the core/cusp density problem in particle dark matter, and that's a lot less speculative, because we know things like galactic jets are practically mandatory. You're generally stuck with appealing to rareness, which is in conflict with Copernican principles which work really remarkably well in cosmology (and astrophysics too), or slowing down dark chemistry so much that it basically doesn't have to enter into equations anyway. Carroll blogged about this a decade (!) ago (how to feel old: remember reading his cosmic variance blogpostings and making the discovery, pardon the pun, of how many years it's been since he stopped blogging there...) here : http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-photons/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-pho... In astrophysics instead of using base-ten for enumerating interesting things in the sky, the counting system goes roughly: forbidden-everywhere, unique, mandatory-everywhere. If you introduce dark matter stars, you would expect there to be so many of them that you could not miss the Einstein lenses they generate. (Similar to MACHO hunting). Dark matter galaxies, being much more massive, would be even harder to miss. You will struggle to find a deep-field image that isn't filled with background galaxies (or clusters) lensing even more background ones. If there are dark galaxies, surely they would be in the foreground of some of the visible galaxies -- otherwise what prevents that? Finally, we do have some gravitational structuring of dark matter; the standard description of structure formation requires it, and it's hard to get the late-time structures we see without dark matter filaments. There's undoubtedly some meat on the Structure Formation wikipedia page and the things it links to, but a briefer and simpler overview is in the last three paragraphs at http://sci.esa.int/planck/51560-the-history-of-structure-formation-in-the-universe/ http://sci.esa.int/planck/51560-the-history-of-structure-for...

JProthero 8y ago

What do you think of the possibility of 'dark sector' interactions?[1] The idea that dark matter might consist of a class of self-interacting particles, and that we might be embedded in a universe full of hidden phenomena as rich as the ordinary-matter phenomena that are visible to us (e.g. dark 'planets', dark 'stars', dark 'galaxies', or something very different) was always intriguing to me, but it seems that a consensus is emerging, based on observations of large-scale distribution, that dark matter is dominated by a single type of particle incapable of self-interaction. Is it still possible that some fraction of the dark matter in the universe is self-interacting, capable of 'clumping' and exhibiting physics similar to ordinary condensed matter, or are all the indications now pointing strongly towards a single non self-interacting particle? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_photon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_photon

raattgift 8y ago
> What do you think of the possibility of 'dark sector' interactions? It remains a possibility. It does not seem to be required by observation, though. Worse, if you move away from parsimonious non-interacting quantum field theories to more complex models, you have to suppress a lot of symmetries that inevitably produce observables which are not seen. Most people working with general relativity just use non-interacting scalar fields, but specific ideas about dark matter have to consider the ins and outs of gauge theory (e.g. does DM only feel gravitons and Higgs or does it also feel one or more of the other non-photon gauge bosons? if it feels the weak force, what goes on at electroweak scales? and so on...). The microscopic details of the microscopic alternatives within the broad family of QFT dark matter get hairy quickly, and there's very little astrophysical evidence to prefer one over the other (people favour axions or sterile neutrinos for reasons from within particle physics, and are looking for such things to complete their extensions to the standard model, they have to be very weakly interacting for particle-physics-in-laboratories reasons, but oh by the way as a side effect dark matter could be wholly or at least partially these proposed standard-model-problem-slaying particles). > [what if we propose dark photons, dark atoms, etc.?] One problem you run into is that if you can form composite dark particles analogous to atoms, or dark molecules, what prevents them from forming larger structures that collapse gravitationally? Likewise, if you can emit dark photons, you're removing momentum-energy from a particle in an orbit, and you would then expect the particle to fall into a closer orbit. Again, how do you prevent gravitational collapse? You might fix that by feeding back (squash DM together in galactic cores, release enormous "dark shine" dark-photon-analogues which then kick the massive DM particles into wider orbits, but it's like balancing a pencil on its tip; this is called DMAF (dark matter annihilation feedback), and is speculative. On the other hand baryon-flow feedback is a thing in solving e.g. the core/cusp density problem in particle dark matter, and that's a lot less speculative, because we know things like galactic jets are practically mandatory. You're generally stuck with appealing to rareness, which is in conflict with Copernican principles which work really remarkably well in cosmology (and astrophysics too), or slowing down dark chemistry so much that it basically doesn't have to enter into equations anyway. Carroll blogged about this a decade (!) ago (how to feel old: remember reading his cosmic variance blogpostings and making the discovery, pardon the pun, of how many years it's been since he stopped blogging there...) here : http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-photons/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/10/29/dark-pho... In astrophysics instead of using base-ten for enumerating interesting things in the sky, the counting system goes roughly: forbidden-everywhere, unique, mandatory-everywhere. If you introduce dark matter stars, you would expect there to be so many of them that you could not miss the Einstein lenses they generate. (Similar to MACHO hunting). Dark matter galaxies, being much more massive, would be even harder to miss. You will struggle to find a deep-field image that isn't filled with background galaxies (or clusters) lensing even more background ones. If there are dark galaxies, surely they would be in the foreground of some of the visible galaxies -- otherwise what prevents that? Finally, we do have some gravitational structuring of dark matter; the standard description of structure formation requires it, and it's hard to get the late-time structures we see without dark matter filaments. There's undoubtedly some meat on the Structure Formation wikipedia page and the things it links to, but a briefer and simpler overview is in the last three paragraphs at http://sci.esa.int/planck/51560-the-history-of-structure-formation-in-the-universe/ http://sci.esa.int/planck/51560-the-history-of-structure-for...