[ExI] Time lapse film of exploding star

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 


>... the only thing I can imagine: our models of how much stuff was available in the old days are wrong.  There must have been a lot more stuff in the old days to make those black holes form close together and grow really big. Heh.  That's an exciting possibility: the standard model is wrong... spike


BillK, what if... dark matter does interact with matter but only under certain special-case conditions?  Suppose that dark matter does something somehow to carry off angular momentum in an interaction we can't see now because it doesn't happen often enough.  But back in the old days when these black hole mergers were happening that we are detecting now, perhaps one part per trillion of dark matter does somehow... I don't know, bounce off of a hydrogen nucleus?  

Or what if... since we know that dark matter does behave the same as matter gravitationally, that a clump of dark matter could be sucked up and dragged along with a sufficiently dense gravitational field such as a neutron star or black hole, then the dark matter eats up the angular momentum by transferring the momentum to itself.  Then right at the last part of the merger event, which is the part we detect with LIGO...  there is no remaining anomalous dark matter additional angular momentum loss because by that time, because the two black holes have already eaten all the dark matter in the neighborhood.  They ate the evidence by then.

By that notion, the end game of a black hole merger would look exactly the way it does, where warping of space-time drains off the last of angular momentum, but in earlier epochs, it was drained off by dark matter.

OK then, I realize that is a wacky idea and I have never seen it proposed by a sane person, but if it turns out to be right, remember you heard it first right here.

spike