Dark Matter?

[The Peon]

Could it be possible that the universe is older then what we presume, and that the empty space in between galaxies is actually burned out dead galaxies containing super massive black holes, and that these invisible dead galaxies could account for the large amount of matter that is undetectable? How feasable is that hypothesis?

[J.C.MacSwell]

Could it be possible that the universe is older then what we presume, and that the empty space in between galaxies is actually burned out dead galaxies containing super massive black holes, and that these invisible dead galaxies could account for the large amount of matter that is undetectable? How feasable is that hypothesis?

 

I think (have read) the upper limit for black hole mass is much less than the required dark matter, but related to the age of the universe, so on that basis it would be feasible.

 

But it would have to be much much older and therefore would not fit the data without very significantly changing some of the underlying assumptions. (rate/s of expansion, distance estimates etc.)

[bigsplit]

The dark matter or missing matter is contained within the galaxies themselves. Unless you accept that there is some mysterious invisable matter, you would have to generate some geometric dynamic as the cause. To do this, you would have to use great imagination and perhaps usurp our entire concept of the geometry and dynamics of our current Universe. To do this you would have to be above genious as you would essentually have to work it out all alone. Unless you could construct a model and make a prediction the Big Bang and its presumed topography could not account for and your model does. Even then, people would be hard press to give up the well researched....very very tough, but not impossible.

[bascule]

I think dark energy (know this is a thread about dark matter, but whatever) is a pretty clear sign that the universe is a lot more complicated than most people give it credit for (scientists excluded)

 

I think it's pretty insane that the overwhelming majority of the universe is made out of something which we really have no clue about...

 

(and by the way, if you didn't garner it from my post it's dark energy which fills the enormous intergalactic gaps, not dark matter)

[bigsplit]

I think dark energy (know this is a thread about dark matter' date=' but whatever) is a pretty clear sign that the universe is a lot more complicated than most people give it credit for (scientists excluded)

 

I think it's pretty insane that the overwhelming majority of the universe is made out of something which we really have no clue about...

 

(and by the way, if you didn't garner it from my post it's dark energy which fills the enormous intergalactic gaps, not dark matter)[/quote']

 

I did not garner it, because dark energy was never mentioned in the post. No one has a clue what is causing the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. The dead BH scenario does not fit, as their would be tell, tell gravitational effects that are different than what is observed...which is a uniform expansion based on Hubble's redshift and distance. There would be far more blue shift than is observed if ancient BH were the cause.

[timo]

Could it be possible that the universe is older then what we presume, and that the empty space in between galaxies is actually burned out dead galaxies containing super massive black holes, and that these invisible dead galaxies could account for the large amount of matter that is undetectable? How feasable is that hypothesis?

That is of course a very good idea. Initially, "dark matter" stands for nothing more than regular matter we simply cannot see (as it doesn´t emmit light as in stars). But of course, the idea of "perhaps it´s black holes" comes to ones mind so naturally that this idea is far from new.

I´m neither an experimentalist nor working in the field of cosmology but I think to remember that there were some experiments looking for massive non light-emmiting objects called "machos" (or at least I think that´s what they´re called). I think some were found but it was way too little to obtain the needed mass.

As far as I´m aware there are a few candidates for dark matter but I can´t remember them all (machos were one, neutrinos another, dunno what else).

 

About two months ago Prof. Wim de Boer from the University of Karlsruhe held quite an interesting talk at

our university. He was rather convinced that they had found dark matter by analyzing radiation data collected by a satelite. They were even able to determine the density distribution of the radiation´s source. Also, he released a paper about this topic this week (didn´t read the paper, yet). You might want to google for his talk; it´s available on his homepage. Don´t know how easy/hard it is to understand without the explanations given but the talk was probably the most interesting one I heard, lately.

 

EDIT: Deleted my previous "off-topic" paragraph.

[The Peon]

Well given the universe appears to be accelerating, Perhaps shortly after the big bang it slowed down drastically, overcame the gravitational pull to draw it back into a singularity, and then started to expand again. Think of a marble being pushed up a hill, it would start out fast (due to the energy you pushed it with) but as it reached the peak it would slow down more and more, but it had enough energy to go over the top, then it would accelerate again as it went down hill faster and faster. Using this analogy, the big bang is the push, the marble is all matter, and the top of the hill is the ultimate peak of gravitational pull from the matter. Now that its over the hump, it is accelerating faster and faster, thus the universe aged alot more then we think as it got over the "hump."

 

Perhaps the Universe is much bigger then we think, and the reason we don't detect anything beyond the farthest galaxies we can see is because they are "burned out" into a singularity themselves, sort of like a universal oort cloud. Perhaps singularities of galaxies have been pulled towards each other, joining into an even larger singularity.