[ExI] Has the mystery of Dark Matter been solved?

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] Has the mystery of Dark Matter been solved?

 

On 2016-05-24 01:33, John Clark wrote:



>>… So whatever Dark Matter is it can not be normal ​

baryonic matter and it can't be made of Stellar Black Holes…John


>…So how does this rule out WIMPs? … It seems a bit premature to immediately latch on to black holes…Although it does indeed nicely explain that early black hole. Of course, we should be able to figure out a frequency distribution of early too large holes from this theory and check it. -- Dr Anders Sandberg

 

 

 

 

LIGO is still a shiny new instrument, only a few years old.  It has already found in that short time a pair of colliding black holes on 14 Sept 2015, but that might have been an unusually easy to see case (sounds like it to me.)  We need to wait and work more on the LIGO data, sift more through the noise, now that we know what a pair of colliding biggies looks like, make sure it agrees with existing theories.

 

Yesterday I saw something amazing.  I am accustomed to seeing the astronomy geek crowd, the kinds of people it attracts and the numbers.  SLAC was offering a free public lecture on LIGO and the 14Sept event.  It was held in their huge main auditorium, and the place was packed, to standing room only.  There were normal-looking people in attendance.  There were actual women in attendance, several of them.  Astonishing!

 

This to me is evidence that we need to always check our long-accepted theories with instruments and data, look carefully for anomalies.  We might discover that LIGO data indicates that something is wrong with our notions on the distribution of black holes and if so, why we don’t see good agreement in the amount of known lensing, or if something else is amiss with long-held assumptions.  We have no good explanation for how lucky we were to have already seen those two biggies collide or for all those women at SLAC yesterday.  In both cases, we could attribute it to our good fortune I suppose.

 

Oh it is a glorious time to be alive if one gets turned on by this sorta thing, and if not, there is still time to become someone like that.

  

spike

 

 
 
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