I'm gonna write a book series about a kid physicist studying dark matter and called it "Diary of a W.I.M.P.y kid" #AstronomyJokes

@SW-User The entire theory revolves around the fact that they DON'T interact with gravity.

@BlueMetalChick or know what it actually is. Funny huh?😂

@SW-User We don't know what it is, but we know what it could be. It's like, if you were looking at the surface of a body of water, and you saw something causing the water to splash around, but you couldn't see underneath to identify what was causing it. You don't know what's making the water move, but you know what it could be. It could be an animal, like a fish or a turtle. It could be the wind blowing on the water. It could be the current interacting with a rock or an aquatic plant. The same idea is applied to dark matter. We see that SOMETHING is causing the objects around it to behave in a certain way. We don't know what that something is but we have ideas for what it could be.

@BlueMetalChick which is a hypothesis. It could be anything really but scientists treat it as a fact only to come out 60 years later saying we were wrong... like it happened so many times. Did you identify it? No? Do you know what it is? No then stfu lol😂

@SW-User Of course it's a hypothesis, that's...the entire study of dark matter. What do you mean that it's treated as fact? The reason why dark matter is being studied is cos we don't know what it is. What facts have been drawn from dark matter? Who has claimed that they know what it is? I certainly haven't heard anyone say so, and I do this for a living.

Don't cop out with the "stfu" response. What, we're just supposed to forget about it and pretend it doesn't exist? "Oh gee I sure am curious what's causing that celestial object to move in an anomalous way. I guess I'll just not ask any questions and pretend it doesn't exist."

@BlueMetalChick you know how you are at a completely alien world and just starting to discover it? You see that alien bush over there? What is that? We don’t know. Ok get on it. 20 years later..these are the facts,this is the thing from inside out. Now we know...
This is the way. Not identifying everything we don’t know and work on everything at the same time. The progression will take a million years.

@SW-User Of course it takes a long time. It isn't like studying things down here on Earth where we can get up close to it or interact with it face to face. If you discover a new species of animal, you can observe it in the wild or study its genetics. If you discover a new species of plant or fungus, you can take samples and watch its growth. If you're researching geology, you can analyze the composition of a rock formation. Astronomy doesn't have that luxury; we have to observe things from light years away, and over very long periods of time, much longer than one human life. Things move incredibly slowly in the world of space science because of it. So, sixty years ago when "dark matter" first gained its name and people took an interest in it, not much has changed since then.

@BlueMetalChick why announce it before we have the knowledge though? What has been announced really besides the words dark matter? Nothing. Why?

@SW-User A little bit has been announced. Some hypothesized explanations are out there, including M.A.C.H.O.s and the aforementioned W.I.M.P.s as well as zero point energy.

And what do you mean, why announce it? Don't you tend to tell people when you have a question you want answered?

@BlueMetalChick like what? What kind of question would an average person have about quasars,black holes or dark matter?

@SW-User Maybe I'm biased because I find it so interesting and fascinating that I could talk about it for hours on end. But even so, making the question public is more about communicating with the rest of the scientific community than anything else.

Don't get me wrong, I'm with you that it's fucking stupid if anyone proclaims they know the answer to the nature of dark matter. They might have an idea of what they think it is, and evidence which makes it seem plausible, but nobody knows at this point. That's the fun of it though I suppose.

@BlueMetalChick my problem is that they publish things with question marks. Which is a clickbait to generate money. If you’re part of that community,you shouldn’t get your info through mainstream. I am fascinated about the subject as well but I feel like people shouldn’t know about dark matter and such until it’s only a theory that’s all. What is the purpose besides generating money?

@SW-User It's a well developed theory with a lot of solid math behind it. People in the field do not base their research on what they read on NBC, Fox or TMZ. PhDs are awarded every day to people doing work in this space.

You could say that prior to Dark Matter, there was Ether (aether), which was first disproven through General Relativity.

Some new research (Case Western) suggests that Dark Matter is not the answer to why galaxies behave the way they do, and just like with Ether, there is nothing, and the answer to why galaxies behave the way they do, is that we don't have a full understanding of gravity. Kind of like when Einstein added a constant to explain the behavior of the universe, before Le Maitre explained the math of the expanding universe.

If we wait until we know everything, for sure, before publicly discussing it, there would be no such thing as scientific discovery.