Astrophysicists have observed the mysterious behavior of star clusters that appears to challenge our current understanding of gravity on a cosmic scale.
Curiously, the observations are consistent with an alternative theory of gravity that may deny the need for dark matter to exist. Although this theory has since been superseded by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Newton’s law of universal gravitation still explains well the structure and motions of the universe on a large scale. But now new observations have been made that don’t quite fit these currently accepted models.
The study was published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.
An international team of astrophysicists has studied open star clusters, where thousands of young stars are born from a large cloud of dust and gas. These clusters have a relatively short duration before dissolving when the stars move in two “tails” – one in front of the cluster and one behind.
“According to Newton’s laws of gravity, the question of which of the tails the lost star ends up in is a matter of chance. This means that both tails should contain approximately the same number of stars. However, in our work, for the first time, we were able to show that this is not the case: in the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars close to the cluster than the rear tail, “he said. stated Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg, co-author of the study.
In the past it was difficult to determine which of the stars in the cluster belonged to which tail, but now scientists have developed a new method for this. They call it the Jerabkova-compact-convergent-point (CCP) method and it has been applied to data on four open star clusters collected from surveys such as the Gaia mission. To their surprise, they found that all four clusters contained far more stars in the main tail than in the final tail, which clearly contradicted Newton’s laws.
The team then modeled the movements of stars in these clusters according to another hypothesis known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). In essence, this model assumes that the effects of gravity are stronger at low accelerations than Newton’s laws. And, interestingly, the predictions of this model matched observations very well.
“To put it simply, according to MOND, stars can leave the cluster through two different doors. One leads to the rear tide, the other to the front. However, the former is much narrower than the latter, so the likelihood of a star leaving the cluster through it is lower. On the other hand, Newton’s theory of gravity predicts that both doors should have the same width, “said Professor Pavel Krupa, first author of the study.
This is not the only way the MOND model fits best with real observations. Star clusters in nearby galaxies have been found to dissolve faster than Newton’s laws predict, but this would be a natural by-product of MOND.
Another major implication of MOND could upset astrophysics as we know it: if that were true, dark matter would not exist. This mysterious substance was invented in the 1930s to explain the discrepancies in the observed motion of stars and galaxies, which were seen moving too fast for the mass they appeared to contain. Dark matter fills the void, adding a huge amount of invisible mass that scientists have been looking for ever since. Decades of experiments aimed at detecting dark matter particles have led to nothing.
However, dark matter is the prevailing theory because it explains many of the observable features of the universe very well and there is a lot of other evidence pointing to its existence.
The study was published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.
Cursor wrote this earlier scientists have discovered a surprising fact about the gravity of the earth. According to scientists, like all planets, the Earth is a product of gravity.
said the cursor scientists have modeled what the earth will look like in 300 million years. The complete disappearance of the oldest of all, the Pacific Ocean, will lead to the unification of several continents into one huge supercontinent.
Moreover, scientists have formulated an interesting hypothesis about the evolution of life on Earth.
It is reported that scientists have said whether the Earth can leave our solar system.
Call this up scientists have found a new way to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
