this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
0 points (NaN% liked)
science
14352 readers
252 users here now
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not a physicist (read "couldn't do the maths“) but MOND feels closer to an natural, organic explanation than Dark Matter. Are there planets formed from Dark Matter? Are there elements and dark molecular structures?
Please can I have a motorcycle made of it?
One of the things with dark matter (specifically WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) is that they don't seem to interact with any force other than gravity. This means they can shed momentum, by interacting with each other, or normal matter. In order for a dense object to form from a cloud, the cloud, as a whole, must shed, or cancel out the momentum of the particles involved. WIMPs would not be able to do this via anything other than gravity. This limits their collapse to around galaxy scale.
In short WIMPs can't form anything more complex than an incredibly diffuse inert gas cloud. We can only detect those clouds on a galactic scale, via their gravity effect.
WIMP is such a great acronym for those lol