Dark matter is believed by science to be what holds everything together, making it impossible for materials in one region to expand to others, while dark energy continues to expand the universe as we know it. This cosmic glue is a theory that was first proposed by an astronomer at the University of Chicago in 1998. On the other hand, scientists have found something that may be capable of beating dark matter, and the way we see galaxies and other objects far away from the Earth could change forever.
Dark matter may lose relevance
The universe has invisible forces responsible for keeping everything in the same place, while also expanding the domain to regions we can’t see because light has not traveled far enough for us to see. While dark matter acts like a gravity in the vacuum, keeping galaxies together while also not pushing them to merge, the dark energy is the force that is expanding the universe.
Both concepts are considered “dark” because we can’t actually see them, but rather speculate that there is something ahead of our comprehension that is doing these two things. This type of matter outweighs the “ordinary” matter by a ratio of five to one, being incredibly stronger and affecting the universe constantly until now, as scientists came up with a new theory that excludes the need for it.
Gravity is the ‘invisible force’ in the universe
Professor Jonathan Oppenheim of the University of London shared a paper on X (previously known as Twitter) with his new theory that excludes dark matter from the expansion of the universe and the galactic rotation equation, as well as dark energy.
The theory is not exclusively new, as many scientists in the past have questioned the veracity of both concepts since they were never observed. The paper published on the ArXiv website raises whether this matter even exists. In the past, other concepts were “disqualified” for the lack of evidence, such as “the Ether”, the planet between Mercury and the sun called Vulcan, or celestial spheres.
Instead of approaching some aspects of the universe as something with an invisible force, the study goes for a simpler explanation: classical gravity. According to Einstein’s general relativity theory, any massive object in the universe can generate gravity because it bends the spacetime, but the paper goes beyond this, and proposes that spacetime fluctuates randomly, which causes chaotic wobbles in time and curvature.
How does the new theory work?
These built-in irregularities could mimic the gravitational effect constantly attributed to dark matter, offering a new lens to look at the cosmos and search for answers. In the study made by Michael Oppenheim and the PhD candidate at the University College London, Andre Russo, the researchers point out to the spiral movement of the galaxies, which is related to the obscure matter theory – this happens because the stars on the edge of the galaxy would have the weakest gravity, but the orbital motion of the stars doesn’t disappear.
The theory applies only to areas where the energy required to keep the stars locked in orbit comes from random fluctuations in spacetime. In this scenario, this phenomenon would dominate. On the other hand, this would be negligible in areas where there are high gravity interactions between objects, like in our solar system, where the sun pulls everything towards it and keeps the planets orbiting around it.
Still in the social media space, Oppenheim stated that this could explain the expansion of the universe and the rotation curves without the abstract concepts created by Edwin Hubble in 1929 (dark energy) and Michael Sutter in 1998 (dark matter).