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'Cosmic radio' detector could discover dark matter within 15 years

(phys.org)
34 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 17 Apr 25 12:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source
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rzz3 ◴[19 Apr 25 18:02 UTC] No.43738153[source]▶
I’ve always felt like (as neither a mathematician nor a physicist) that “dark matter” is simply just something that suddenly makes a math problem work to model the universe-—and that in reality, that math problem just doesn’t work.

Is my theory even _possible_ here, or am I missing something. Really fundamental?

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1. luma ◴[19 Apr 25 18:10 UTC] No.43738206[source]▶
Dark matter is a proposition put forward to explain observations. It’s not a result of pretty math, it’s the result of a lot of different observations which don’t align with the current math unless you stick something like dark matter into it.
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2. jvanderbot ◴[19 Apr 25 18:14 UTC] No.43738248[source]▶
So yes. It is a missing term that balances our models of physics against observations. The implications of that term and hypothesis as to its physical reality are what we are trying to figure out right?
3. slowmovintarget ◴[20 Apr 25 17:11 UTC] No.43745026[source]▶
There are pretty math pathways to dark matter, though, and they tend to be more compelling reasons to believe there is something that fits the notion of a particle that we can't detect (or is very difficult to detect). Specifically, bariogenesis calculations, given the current standard model, actually require dark matter--it's the label we've arrived at--as a result. Observations led to the hypothesis, calculations led to more evidence.