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Article: Much ado about nothing; Cosmology.(Dark matter is no longer needed. Perhaps.)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- October 22, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A controversial new calculation suggests dark matter might not exist
THE adage "what you see is what you get" could be thought to ring true for a group of people who dedicate their lives to collecting tiny flickers of light from very distant objects. But astronomers and cosmologists, who do exactly that, have long held that the universe is pervaded by far more than that which can be seen. Since the 1930s, they have postulated the existence of "dark matter", an ethereal and, as yet, undetected form of matter.
Physicists claim to need dark matter to explain why the stars in the outermost reaches of rotating galaxies are moving at such great speeds. If ...