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Is there dark matter at the center of the Milky Way which also decays?
- ianamartin 7y agoIt's kind of impressive to me how much of modern science is really just people misapplying statistical models they don't understand to data that doesn't fit assumptions. Snark aside, what's really interesting is the way that different fields respond to it when the model errors are discovered. Physics and Chemistry seem to be fairly (or at least comparatively) professional and receptive when they find out about mistakes. But mention a model error or data mismatch to someone in Neuroscience or Climatology? You're suddenly an anti-science heretic and probably murder kittens for fun.
- alterAgnes 7y agoJust goes to show which ones are on the shakiest ground. And which ones are driven by political bias. Climatology has polar ice caps, at least. Neuroscience, though, you can bet, is about as disciplined as our awareness of the dietary preferences of pond scum. Does this species of amoeboid life enjoy cheeseburgers?
- blotter_paper 7y agoI feel like this has to do with supervenience. Higher order fields have more noise, which means that more hypotheses seem valid to different people and that it's easier to make incorrect arguments against valid hypotheses.
- Tagbert 7y agoFor Climatology, there are a lot of crazy or disingenuous people who try to weigh in on topics. That makes everyone gun-shy and likely to lash out at criticism because they are so used to getting attacked by unsupported arguments.
- ianamartin 7y agoThis is excellent. Thank you.
- ianamartin 7y agoI love that this comment is generating downvotes. Thanks for making my point!
- acqq 7y agoIt really seems to be very interesting and relevant work: One of the authors vas a coauthor of the 2015 paper that was now disproven about its “it can’t be dank matter” claim: "My hope was that this would be just the first of many studies of the galactic center region using similar techniques. But by 2018, the main cross-checks of the method were still the ones we'd done in 2015, which made me pretty nervous that we might have missed something." And the whole article about this new paper is informative.
- tsukurimashou 7y ago> dank matter
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWell, if the dark matter is also damp...
- raverbashing 7y agoIt's an interesting approach. More "debunking the debunking" studies like this are needed. It seems there is a bias and "debunking with a weak method" is much more likely to be accepted than "proving with a moderate method". Ok, the null hypothesis might be more likely, but some methods are just inappropriate.
- knzhou 7y agoThis is a good article because it gives insight into how the scientific process works: nobody is "for" or "against" various dark matter hypotheses, an analysis that definitively supports either direction can be very interesting, and people who think a lot about dark matter often publish papers showing that various effects can't be due to it. Actually, this is the default situation in our field, and it's a good one. The only issue is that typically only the "hottest" stuff get popular exposure, which usually means the most blaring declarations of discovery, like the hundreds of fifth force articles we just got hit with. (My one minor complaint is that the headline by itself is misleading. The question is whether there is dark matter at the center of the Milky Way which also decays, leading to the signals mentioned in the article.)
- raxxorrax 7y agoIsn't it basically just matter that isn't detectable but has to exist because the known laws of nature told us it does? Instead some mystery goo that hides from our sight? Yes, I am sure the mystery goo theories would get much more exposure. The pitfalls of pop-sci probably. I mean wich kid will get out of bed for a boring pulsar these days? > "I was pretty excited, because I knew the implications were very big—it meant that the dark matter explanation was back on the table" I don't understand this. Isn't this basically feeding? Doesn't this just say we know less than we thought? Were we in danger of knowing everything?
- noselasd 7y ago>Isn't it basically just matter that isn't detectable but has to exist because the known laws of nature told us it does? > Instead some mystery goo that hides from our sight? Maybe. We assume "dark matter" has to exists because it interacts with/creates gravity. The only thing we know that can do so is matter. However this besides detecting gravity interactions with normal matter, this dark matter cannot be seen, not in any wavelenghts, nor does it block any light or radiation from normal matter that's behind it. It's not like it's just a bunch of normal matter that hides in a corner we cannot see by normal means.
- 7y ago
- donmatito 7y agoThis looks like a very healthy process, of people questionning their own results ! The scientific method, as it should be. beautiful
- girishso 7y agoSlightly tangential. One thing I always wonder about, is there no dark matter around us, I mean here on earth?
- jansan 7y agoGive me a dark matter detector and I will tell you.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoThere should be some, but dark matter is inherently very hard to detect, so we don't know how much there is.
- contravariant 7y agoAlthough if the 'small rogue black hole' theory still has some merit then we can at least pretty conclusively rule out that there are no such black holes.
- maxnoe 7y agoThere should be and we are looking for it. Several experiments are looking for WIMPs or other proposed particles on Earth or in the solar system. But the amount us tiny, current estimates of the dark matter density in the Milky Way result in roughly 700 grams of DM in the Earths volume
- adrianN 7y agoDo we have estimates on how heavy individual dark matter "particles" are? Could the 700g all be in one blob?
- wiz21c 7y agodo you mean that 700g of that stuff can actually interact with earth's gravity in meaningful way ? If so, (I'm no scientist at all), that sounds like a very powerful matter indeed :-)
- mnw21cam 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avCGl2_6MQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avCGl2_6MQc