What Tlocity is doing makes me think of someone that has read several movie reviews but never actually saw a movie review. Then the person writes a summary and says he's made a movie.

The only reason for belief in dark matter is the math.

I don't think you have ever seen a reasearch paper. You have only seen the summary after. Not even Scientic American prints the real science.


I think Rpenner should post a real science theor paper, just so people can have a look at one.

No need to argue, the current data and theory is available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Note the flat rotation curve of spiral galaxies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_curve

This phenomenon can be accounted for only by hypothesized non observable matter.

Back to the question: Does dark matter operate in the context of our solar system?

My lightbulb trying to understand dark matter went on when I came to the same conclusion as sporacle, that dark matter is the general result of gravitational effects on light. If Einstein showed that light responds to gravity, then everything we see is actually distorted by the effect of gravity on the light that reaches our lenses before it reaches them. "Dark matter" seems to me to just be regular matter, whose emitted or reflected light has been diverted or otherwise prevented from reaching the vantage point of the observer.

People tend to think of light as traveling infinitely through space without resistance, so the photospheres of luminescent or illuminated bodies are thought to extend infinitely, unless gravitationally diverted/bent by an extremely massive object or trapped altogether by a black hole.

What if a photosphere behaves similarly to an atmosphere, with photons tending toward containment within a certain proximity of the planetary mass? Perhaps the radius of a given star's photosphere could extend many many light years, but then thin out considerably as it "falls" back in the direction of the star or other masses.

If this were the case, then black holes might not be super-dense masses, necessarily. They might just be light emitting/reflecting bodies whose mass and distance are such that the light they emit does not reach the lens before it "falls" back toward the body that emitted/reflected it. From a vantage point much closer to the black hole, it might appear to be a normal body like a planet, star, etc.

If gravity's effects on light are diverse, then we would expect various kinds of doppler effects, other than red and blue shift, in all observations. For example, when they talk about these clusters emitting x-rays, this could be a doppler-type shift of another electro-magnetic wavelength to x-ray as a result of the motion and/or gravitation of bodied emitting, reflecting, or otherwise influencing (gravitationally "pulling on") the light.

A black hole is striking because it is the result of an interaction between very gravitationally distinct light-sources. A normal star seems to be getting sucked into a black hole possibly just because the photon streams are interacting with the gravity of a "dark" mass before the stream reaches earth.

I don't think that space is really bent the way Einstein described it. That was just his way of accounting for the doppler effects of gravitation on light. Since photons are the lightest and fastest form of (quasi) matter known to exist, there is no way to define space except in the lines created by the paths of photons. If a photon and a planet were both orbiting the sun, the planet only appears to be in a curved orbit relative to the much less curved orbit of the photon. The photon appears to travel in a straight line to the planet and reflect in a straight line to the observation point, but in fact it may only appear to be a straight line because the orbit circumference is very very long relative to that of the orbiting planet.

If this is the case then couldn't the horizon apparent from hubble's lens be explained as the result of a large number of bodies with similar gravitational and light-emitting characteristics all at the same distance from hubble, with the same radius photosphere?

Maybe I am leaning too much on normal gravitation to explain these light effects, but it just strikes me that physicists assume to much that what they see is a direct representation of emitting/reflecting bodies, instead of considering that what they see is the result of photons traveling through the gravitational waves of the universe before reaching their lenses.

FLAT EARTH EXTRAPOLATION

Here is where my ideas start seeming really crazy. Could the apparent spherical shape of heavenly masses, including the Earth and moon, be the result of the gravitational pull of the mass on the light reflecting off its surface? Could it be that what appears to be the curvature of the surface of a planet or moon may actually just be a horizon-effect of the mass pulling on light coming from more distant points?

What experiment could test this, other than finding an observation point between two bodies massive and close enough to each other to negate each other's gravitation effects on light? If such a situation would occur, the two masses would be traveling so fast toward each other that a collision would occur before observation was possible.

Is the distance to the horizon from the same distance above ground different on the Earth compared to the moon, mars, or other planets? If so, might this provide an opportunity to measure the relative influence of gravitation compared with planetary circumference on horizon-observer distance? Or would the measurable circumference of a planet or moon be a function of its gravitation to begin with, and therefore always be proportionate with horizon-proximity?

This sounds silly perhaps, but still it's something to consider. The question is how would you describe the shape of a planet, moon, or other gravitationally significant mass if it only appears to be spherical as a result of its gravitational pull bending light and space? Is the Earth really flat after all?

mybe the universe is geomtricaly unshaped more like a blob now do galaxies travel at the same speed as others do?