Comment by I_am_tiberius

I'm not a physicist either, but the amount of evidence pointing in the direction of dark matter is extremely significant, it's a little silly to just dismiss all that based on your intuition.

> No idea what equations are used for getting to the result

"Basic" gravitational equations applied to observed behaviour: clumping and rotation of galaxies, lensing (light bending), etc.

The behaviour implies "something" is exerting force in a mass like way - but there's a shortfall of visible mass.

The observational hole left by the apparent behaviour of "unseen matter" attracts a lot of theory.

* Physics "allows for" various types of particles with various types of properties - these may or may not all exist, some do. eg: Neutrino's from the sun barely interact with anything, consistently capturing them is a challenge. Maybe Dark Matter is a new hard to observe gravity particle.

* Physics has equations formed by "human scale" observation and sometimes tweaked for scales beyond direct human experience. eg: relativistic tweaks related to speeds approaching that of light. Maybe Dark Matter is a warping of observation at galaxy scale.

The opening paragraphs of, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter cover the ground of speculation.

For those who are interested in learning why physicists think dark matter exists, there's an excellent and accessible talk[1] freely available over at PIRSA where an astrophysicist goes through exactly what we know about the universe and how many different kinds of evidence all seem to point in a similar direction: dark matter exists.

[1]: https://pirsa.org/26030070

“constant missing in our math” is roughly how inventing new particles in physics works.

When your equations are missing a number to work, you announce a new particle.

400 years ago you'd be saying the same thing about heliocentrism.

> I just can't believe something like dark matter exists.

That's a lot like a blind person saying they can't believe light exists.

It takes only a small amount of knowledge of physics to understand why and how dark matter might be possible, even likely. So small, in fact, that I can describe it in this comment.

The tl;dr is that all the senses you experience - sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing - depend on the electromagnetic (EM) interaction. Touch, smell, taste, and hearing all depend on how electrons interact, and sight depends on how photons interact with electrons. But EM is only one of four fundamental interactions that we know of. We humans are essentially blind to all the others, without using devices to detect their presence.

But using devices we've invented, we can detect all sorts of things that we can't detect directly with our senses. X-rays and gamma rays, for example. But those are still just high-energy photons, not a different kind of particle altogether. They just help illustrate how limited our senses are.

A better example is the neutrino. They're pretty close to being "dark matter," because they don't interact via electromagnetism. As a result, they can pass right through your body, because there's nothing much to stop them. You're just as invisible to a neutrino as a neutrino is to you. It's estimated that about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body each second.

But neutrinos aren't perfectly "dark" - although they don't interact with electromagnetism, they do interact via the weak nuclear interaction, which is mostly something that happens inside the nuclei of atoms. (They also interact via gravity, but they have very small mass, so that doesn't help us detect them.)

We can detect neutrinos by building huge tanks full of very pure substances like water or argon, and burying them deep underground, to shield them from other interference. We can then look for the tell-tale signs that occur when a neutrino just happens to have a direct hit on an atomic nucleus, something that doesn't happen very often because nuclei are very small. That's why we need large tanks - to increase the odds of a hit.

The IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica (https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/icecube/) extends to 2.5 km underground, and Super-Kamiokande in Japan (https://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/sk/) is buried 1 km below a mountain. They're able to detect neutrinos with high confidence, because aside from the tell-tale sing we can often even relate the neutrinos they detect to astronomical sources such as supernovae and supermassive black holes.

Neutrinos show that it's possible to have matter that doesn't interact via electromagnetism, which is all but invisible to us. And not just invisible - it can pass right through us. In the case of neutrinos, we're just "lucky" that they participate in the weak nuclear interaction, so we can detect them if we try hard enough. But what if a particle didn't do that? Then you'd have real dark matter - particles that we can't detect at all, except via the energy they carry, which participates in the gravitational interaction. But it's very difficult to detect tiny particles using gravity - which is why the first place we think we've detected dark matter is at large scales, in the motion of galaxies, where the collective mass of dark matter is large enough to be detected.

With all this in mind, a question dark matter skeptics would need to answer is, why wouldn't we expect dark matter to exist? We've identified quite a large zoo of particles, and what distinguishes each of them is that they each participate differently in the different interactions that we know about. Here's a summary of the fundamental particles and their participation in the fundamental interactions - which are gravity, electromagnetism (EM), weak nuclear, and strong nuclear (the latter two are different types of interactions that happen to have very generic names):

Electron: gravity, EM, weak

Neutrino: gravity, weak

Photon: gravity, EM

Quark: gravity, EM, weak, strong

Gluon: gravity, strong

Dark matter: gravity, ?

There's no physical reason we wouldn't expect a particle like dark matter to exist. It doesn't even have to have no interaction other than gravity - it could just have a very small degree of interaction that we can't easily detect, which is what the OP experiment is counting on.

If you accept the existence of X-rays and neutrinos, then it's not very consistent to draw the line at dark matter, once you have some understanding of the physics involved.