13 things that do not make sense

biko

Apologies if this has been posted before but I just ran into it today and thought I'd share: http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600

5 Dark matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.

And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
“If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry”

FunkyChicken

Pretty interesting read

coffee_cake

I didn't think inflation theory was that incredible...

Son Goku

After that article was written the first Dark Galaxy was found and we've been finding them ever since. Entire galaxies worth of non-luminous material.
It is now considered possible that Dark Matter is pretty much just these galaxies that just never turned on, probably because their central blackhole wasn't violent enough.