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My theory on dark matter. How feasible is this?
Is it possible that this so-called "dark matter" is simply made up of rogue planets and brown dwarfs that are currently undetected by us, and that these may even greatly outnumber the number of stars in our galaxy by more than 1000:1?
In my opinion this would be the simplest explanation rather than the concept of it being some exotic form of matter.
Our observations so far suggest that small red dwarfs are the most common stars in the galaxy. Is this the case because there is something special about that specific size of body that makes it more likely to form, or is it rather that the smaller bodies are more numerous and the ones smaller than red dwarves are simply too dim to be detected currently?
I reckon in the future as our technology progresses, we will find more and more of these smaller bodies and one day we will find that there are many rogue planets/brown dwarves even closer to us than Proxima Centauri.
(oh, and btw, i'm not trying to qualify any Nibiru/planet-x doomsday malarkey!)
14 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
Dark matter is more likely to be on the atomic scale because billions of large dense objects like planets, neutron stars and black holes would cause very local gravitational disturbances within galaxies, churning the steady rotational movement observed into chaotic localised swirls everywhere we look. A small finer structure homogeneously spread through space, smaller than dust particles which would obscure too much light, would seem much more likely. Subatomic particles, perhaps neutrinos, or similar particles containing a minuscule mass, and in sufficiently immense numbers are perhaps the best candidates.
- Mark GLv 71 decade ago
There are a number of points here that are incorrect. Firstly even in the infrared we can only see brown dwarfs out to may be 100 parsecs. There is an issue with the number of micro lensing events that should be caused by brown dwarfs - there are no enough - but there are several explanations for this.
However back to your question. This is a very good point and one that has already been looked into and I'm afraid the answer is no. It is clear that dark matter is non-baryonic and so cannot be the item you suggested.
- green meklarLv 71 decade ago
>Is it possible that this so-called "dark matter" is simply made up of rogue planets and brown dwarfs that are currently undetected by us, and that these may even greatly outnumber the number of stars in our galaxy by more than 1000:1?
They would HAVE to outnumber the stars by hundreds or thousands to one in order to constitute enough mass to explain dark matter, since dark matter outweighs all the luminous matter we have found by about four times. In any case, observations have essentially already ruled out this hypothesis. For one thing, massive objects like that ought to cause frequent microlensing events, and studies that have been done using telescopes have found less than 1% of the microlensing events that ought to be happening under your model. For another thing, the orbital speeds of stars around the centers of galaxies allow us to map out the distribution of dark matter, and the mapping we have ended up with is highly 'fuzzy', more characteristic of a hot, diffuse gas of some kind than of a collection of solid objects.
>Our observations so far suggest that small red dwarfs are the most common stars in the galaxy. Is this the case because there is something special about that specific size of body that makes it more likely to form
Actually, there is, although the strength of its effect is hard to estimate exactly. See, stars and the smaller objects that orbit stars form out of clouds of gas and dust in space, which were produced earlier by massive stars exploding (eventually being traced back to the first stars in the Universe, which coalesced out of the primordial hydrogen gas around at that time). During the formation of a star system, the gas collects and becomes denser and hotter in the center, but as soon as nuclear fusion starts, the energy it produces tends to blow a lot of the light gas farther away, where it either escapes into interstellar space or gets to form into planets. In other words, an object that is not yet large enough to undergo fusion tends to collect more gas until fusion starts.
- Nick N. AmeLv 41 decade ago
A about 23% of the universe is Dark matters and and about 74% is dark energy; then rest - 3% - is everything that make up us and everything we can see and detect.
If you were right there would be so many rogue planets and brown dwarfs floating in-between the stars and the galaxies that they would block out all the starlight and we wouldn't be ably to see anything.
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- gintableLv 71 decade ago
Brown dwarfs still glow in infrared. They are fully detectable via black body radiation.
A brown dwarf like the fake legendary Sun companion Nemesis would easily be detectible by any infrared telescope, just as easily as all other known brown dwarfs.
The same with rogue planets. If there were a rogue planet half way between the Sun and the Alpha-Proxima Centauri System, its estimated temperature would be about 4 Kelvin, which is still hotter than the cosmic microwave background, and it still could be detected.
Also, planets are a very small fraction of the mass of galaxies and planetary systems. The Sun contains 99.86% of all the solar system's mass. For purposes of comparison, the red dwarf star Gliese 581 also contains over 99.94% of its planetary system total known possible mass.
Dark matter doesn't show evidence in any way shape or form via electromagnetic radiation.
Dark matter is likely the elementary particle neutrinos.
- Anonymous5 years ago
take a seem at Sam's answer. It shows he hasn't the slightest clue of what he's speaking approximately. The bb concept money owed for what surpassed off quickly AFTER the Universe we see began. It does not attempt to describe the actual initiate simply by fact it won't be able to. the reason of that's the maths we've and the actual regulations we are attentive to give up to artwork in the previous a definite time called the tip of the Planck epoch. Astrophysicists and cosmologists are nicely attentive to this, and so are maximum different people who're extremely nicely mentioned on the project. The bb concept is backed up by making use of the recession of thousands of thousands of distant galaxies, all measured, the cosmic microwave history, measured intimately many situations in view that 1965, the universal chemical composition of the Universe, that's measured by making use of galactic and action picture star spectra, it is settlement with relativity, that's time-venerated to be a suited concept and the shown fact that that's a determination of Olber's paradox. Any rival concept has to account for many those info mathematically and are watching for something that is examined,. Bb concept estimated the comedian microwave history greater suitable than 10 years in the previous it became by twist of destiny discovered. No different concept, to my awareness has performed this. The drained mild concept that's meant to be an determination to the pink shift from galactic recession provides no actual mechanism by making use of which the mild can get drained and it does not account for the different info. So till the drained mild theorists can pull a great rabbit out of a small hat that's in simple terms going to stay a wager.
- 1 decade ago
Isn't it more likely that we just got gravity wrong and that gravity is stronger over large distances than it is over short distances? We can detect things like you describe, and most likely some dark matter is simply space junk but still there has to be something where nothing is or else we need to redo gravity and add maybe something like John Moffats Modified Gravity theory to the realm of possibilty.
Either we will reproduce dark matter and it does exist, or Einstiens work will need some tweaking... and btw he spent the rest of his life trying to come up with a better theory so he kind of knew something would need to be done about the singularity issue.. and now dark matter.
- 1 decade ago
We know how much matter was created in the Big Bang (about 10^40 protons), and because matter/energy is conserved we know that this figure hasn't changed. So all the "ordinary" matter (stars, galaxies, planets) has been accounted for; the "extra" gravity associated with Dark Matter cannot be explained by the presence of anything we already know exists
Also, as you suggest, we already know, theoretically, how many low-mass stars there should be, even without ever being able to detect them. So, again, they've already been figured in as part of the ordinary matter in the Universe.
- StarskiLv 61 decade ago
You HYPOTHESIS is unlikely. Those kinds of objects would have to be extremely numerous, and could be detected as they passed in front of stars. Their gravity would briefly increase the star's brightness. That behavior was searched for and NOT found often enough to represent anything near the number of small objects necessary to account for Dark Matter.
This is why WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are now considered better candidates than your MACHOS (Massive Compact Halo Objects). Sorry.
- John de WittLv 71 decade ago
There's no way that MACHOs can account for a great portion of the missing dark matter. I'm sure you're right about a little of it, but the entire structure of baryogenesis would have to be re-written if MACHOs were even a tenth of the cold dark matter theorized.