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? Ian Fleming at Camp-X | Main | Transparent armour ?

October 26, 2005

Dark matter

Calculations by University of Victoria physicists, Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu shed new light on purported dark matter. I had thought the whole "we cannot see it therefore it must be there" premise sounded a bit dodgy.

To their surprise, when he and Mr Tieu did the calculation with general relativity, they found that they were able to reproduce the observed speeds at which individual stars are orbiting the centre of a galaxy, without requiring the galaxy to contain dark matter. Indeed, the distribution of mass through the galaxy roughly followed the distributions of visible matter, with no need for exotic new particles.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at October 26, 2005 08:14 AM

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