theory of dark matter and missing mass

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by lagger, May 29, 2005.

  1. lagger Registered Member

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    I have developed an idea that could explain the Mass the scientists say is missing/invisible. I would welcome your comments or just blow the theory out as rubbish.

    Firstly, my idea was that the universe was completely illuminated by heat or light/radiation as each sun/star emits light/heat (for the life of the star) in every direction and this will travel at a constant speed for infinity. You appear anywhere in the universe and light from all the stars will eventually (in time, this could be millions of years) reach you.

    Then I realised that radiation has a life span so, if a star was so far way that the radiation/light/heat had completely gone, then all that would pass through space to you would be the original particle.

    This particle has a weight, this then is the 'Dark Matter'. The universe is completely filled with Particles of varying heat.

    Would it then mean that the missing Mass, is the light particles of varying temperature that fill our universe?

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  3. blobrana Registered Senior Member

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    Yeah that sounds good
    Except for the fact that light has no mass.

    And yes perhaps it is unstable and decays into `something`, but then we would have the problem that very distant galaxies, say, 13 billion light years away would be fainter than they should be. So we can be fairly sure that in over 13 billion years the light remains unchanged.

    The current theories predict that it is non baryonic matter (and unlike the normal matter we know about)
     
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  5. UnderWhelmed Registered Senior Member

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    Do we know for sure that light has no mass? I have always wondered about that. For light to be bent, shouldn't it have some sort of mass. Also for my eyes to preceive it, doesn't have to leave some sort of imput on my optical nerves...etc...

    Just curious
     
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  7. Tristan Leave your World Behind Valued Senior Member

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    Light is energy. the photons that hit your retina promote a chemical reaction (i.e. nerve signal) through the energy they pass on when they collide with the rods and cones in your eye. (Btw, you have to think of light in terms of Wave-Particle Duality. We can explain its actions sometimes with the idea of a particle (seemingly requiring mass) and other times explain its actions as a wave (requiring no mass as it is just energy). Thinking of Light soley as a particle can be misleading.

    Light itself isnt bent by anything. Gravity warps the fabric of space-time. Light follows this fabric just like ordinary matter. So as space-time is warped, light appears to be bent when in fact its the path it travels on that is bent. Dispersion through a prism occurs because as light passes through a substance, the seperate wavelengths of light travel at different speeds and therefore take seperate paths through the glass (thus it looks spread apart and 'bent')

    And yes, along with Gravity, Light is still a poorly understood phenomena. Although its consequences can be seen and we have harnessed the power of it various ways, we still dont know what 'it' is. Just like gravity... we see its effects, but not exactly what causes it... and the same thing with magnetic fields too

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  8. UnderWhelmed Registered Senior Member

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    Things in this universe would be lot easier if we could explain light, gravity, magnetic fields and how they relate and interact with all other matter....etc...
     
  9. Tristan Leave your World Behind Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly, thus why there is constantly research on the subject. I know of research concerning gravity and many theories trying to detect actuall particles as the cause of it.

    We could do alot more stuff technologically if we determined the causes of these few things

    Later
    T
     
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  11. cato less hate, more science Registered Senior Member

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    that’s very interesting Mr Anonymous, do you have a link to this theory? Perhaps some of what we think are black holes are actually areas of extreme topographical curvature with stars orbiting it. great, my mind is going to b dissolving this all night while I am trying to sleep.
     
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  13. creek 1884 APOLO Registered Senior Member

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    Interesting ideas both from Mr Anonomous and the others above. Light has mass and it does'nt have mass. It is a stream of little somethings (photons) and it is a ray of radiation. Take your choise. I've read that scientists are proposing a space craft powered by a huge sail (like a sailig ship) made of aluminium foil. The idea is that the light rays from the sun will be pushing on the sail much like the wind is pushing a sailboat across the ocean.So far this is only a proposal and has'nt been tryed, but to my knowledge no scientist has argued that it wont work.So if the photons can really push this sail along, one could argue that the photons must have a tiny bit of mass. Hu ?

    REGARDS APOLLO
     
  14. cato less hate, more science Registered Senior Member

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    no, photons have momentum, which can be given to the sail, but no mass. well, if I remember correctly, we have only measured light to be massless out to like 64 decimal places, so we don’t know for sure. my teacher would explain it as having a "speudo-mass" because it has momentum and is effected by gravity. but no real mass.
     
  15. blobrana Registered Senior Member

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    Hum,
    Any early topological features would be flattened out by inflation.
    It would also require us to be located at the very centre of the `trough`, a very contrived situation.
     
  16. UnderWhelmed Registered Senior Member

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    Didn't someone say earlier in this thread that light isn't effected by gravity, the space itself is bent and then the light travels "straight" along a new path.

    Someone should find out what is really going on with photons...
     
  17. geistkiesel Valued Senior Member

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    The missing mass could also be a bogus scientific theory. Read all the sides of the big bang theory and it tends to deflate rather quickly, the big bang I mean. Google on arp astronomy.
    Are you absolutely sure that dark matter and black holes are real? Absolutely sure? If so you don't read widely enough.
    Geistkiesel​
     
  18. cato less hate, more science Registered Senior Member

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    sorry for not being clearer, gravity IS the curvature, and thus if light takes a straight path through this curvature/gravity (which it does) it is effected from our point of view.
     
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  20. creek 1884 APOLO Registered Senior Member

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    Yes Anonymous, I see you have been reading the same books as I have. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I was equating the solar wind with a stream of photons, be they from light rays, gamma rays or x rays and whatever other rays the sun shoots out.

    To geistkiesel.
    You mention we should google arp/astronomy. I have Arp's book in my bookcase (Halton Arp "Seeing RED") but I would advise any fundamentalist member of the Big Bang Gang not to go there. They wont be able to sleep for a week.

    REGARDS APOLO
     
  21. blobrana Registered Senior Member

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  23. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry, but all the light produced by the universe for its entire life up to now would not add up to even a large fraction of the required mass to explain dark matter.

    Consider this:

    The sun, an average star, converts about 4290000000 kg of matter to energy per sec.

    The mass of the sun is some 2 x 10^30 kg. At the rate that the Sun gives up mass, in 20 billion years (estimated upper limit for the age of the universe) the Sun would have only converted about 1/750 of its mass to light.

    The estimated percentage of dark matter is 99% of the mass of the universe.

    For this amount of dark matter to be accounted for by light, suns would have had to produce light at a much higher rate in the past than they do now . Now the more massive a star, the faster it burns. So this means that the universe would have had to been populated by large numbers of extremely massive stars in the past. Massive stars are also hotter and thus have a different specturm than average stars.

    Now the thing is, we have the ability to look into the past to see what kinds of stars made up the universe of the past. When we look at the image of a distant galaxy we see it as it was when the light left it. If it is 10 billion light years away, we see it as it was 10 billion years ago. If it was populated by mainly massive hot stars, we could tell. There is no indication that past galaxies have those types of star populations to the degree needed.

    Also, a lot of what we know about dark matter we learned from observing the behavior of those distant galaxies. If dark matter existed in the form of light, then in the past there would have been less of it. It would have been still tied up in the mass of the stars. We don't see any such change in the percentage of dark matter as we look at further (and thus younger) galaxies.
     

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