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Re:Is dark matter's main rival theory dead? by lostmsu on Sunday May 12, 2024 @11:57AM (#40335433)
Can someone ELI15? Does this work claim that because galaxies fly around each other, potentially around some bigger center of mass, rather than in straight lines, their rotation curves look differently/are actually different, and nobody checked before?
Re:Is dark matter's main rival theory dead? by Protostome on Sunday May 12, 2024 @01:57PM (#40336225)
Disclaimer: the authors are good friends of mine and I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist, so I'll try my best to explain it:

The basic idea here, is that the reference frames used to measure galaxy rotation curves may not be inertial. that is, they might be influenced by rotational or other accelerative forces due to the galaxies' motion in the universe. Traditionally, it's assumed these frames are inertial, meaning they are free from such influences, which simplifies calculations but might overlook significant effects, and that's the key point that has been missed and is addressed by the paper, showing that you can't overlook those effects.

if we consider these non-inertial effects akin to acknowledging that galaxies might not be moving in straightforward, stable paths but could be "flying around" each other or a common center, then we can account for the observed rotation curves differently. They suggest that the forces arising from these complex motions could mimic the effects attributed to dark matter.

AFAIK, this has not been rigorously checked in the past. However, there are several other phenomenon that are explained by dark matter / dark energy besides this discrepency, so people in the field are not very eager to give up on dark matter just yet

Re:Is dark matter's main rival theory dead? by lostmsu on Sunday May 12, 2024 @06:03PM (#40337921)
Sounds like you are confirming my TL;DR; explanation.