Comment by daveguy
4 hours ago
I don't understand why it has to be non-electromagnetically interacting. Can we honestly say we should be able to resolve all the matter in a galaxy with our current sensing technologies? Why can't it just be the equivalent of non-light-emitting asteroids and planets. We can barely detect whether a star has planets in our own galaxy. And according to Wikipedia the amount of matter we would be missing in a sphere with radius from the sun to Neptune is 10^17 kg or approximately a large asteroid. Which seems like a rounding error. But my knowledge of astronomy is definitely minimal.
Do you honestly think you've come up with a clever idea that none of the researchers in the field already considered?
You are describing MACHOS, which was one hypothesis for dark matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
The thing is, we've looked for them. If they were small (asteroid sized), the amount required would be visible as dark clouds obscuring the objects behind them. If they were large (brown dwarf or bigger), we'd see gravitational lensing from them. We don't really see either of those on the scale required to explain the gravitational effect.
shit man. I was asking a question. So much for curiosity at HN.
I think it's the "can we honestly say" phrasing that got you flamed here. It reads as "those stupid scientists don't know what they're doing".
Curiosity is one thing, but in practice "just asking questions about dark matter" is uncomfortably close to pseudoscience and a lot of us are sick of it. It's similar to if you had accidentally said something similar to a young-earth creationist.
HN is less hackers than it is pedantic VC lackeys training for their aspirational role as a wealthy-and-opinionated Twitter personality.
> I don't understand why it has to be non-electromagnetically interacting
Because we have zero evidence of it electromagnetically interacting. We have evidence of other particles like this, like neutrinos.
> Why can't it just be the equivalent of non-light-emitting asteroids and planets
Because they've been ruled out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
You are not proposing anything new. Your ideas have been thought of before, and discarded because they lack evidence.
Hah. I didn't think I was proposing anything new. I was telling you how it sounds to someone who isn't an astronomer.