RT reports that astronomers observing star clusters in our galaxy have found evidence that controversially defies Newton’s laws of gravity and could change our understanding of the universe.
This puzzling discovery supports the controversial idea that it eliminates dark matter completely. Scientists found this evidence by observing open clusters of stars—that is, finite, interconnected groups of up to a few hundred stars found in larger galaxies.
Open clusters have trails of stars in front of and behind them, known as tidal tails.
The tidal tail is a thin, elongated region of interstellar gas and stars that extends to Outer space from the galaxy.
The scientists’ observations indicate that the front tail of these clusters always contains far more stars near the cluster than the trailing tail, defying Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which suggests that there should be an equal number of stars. at both ends.
“It’s very important,” astrophysicist Pavel Krupa of the University of Bonn told Live Science. “It’s a huge impact.”
Krupa added that this patchy distribution of stars is visible, but not intense enough to include any kind of dark matter, the invisible matter thought to exert a strong gravitational pull on visible matter in the universe.
He continued: “This is basically a game changer and this destroys all the work that has been done on galaxies and cosmology that postulates dark matter and Newtonian gravity.”
Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation, published in 1687, states that every particle in space is attracted to other bodies with a force proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Albert Einstein later incorporated this law into his general theory of relativity, which was published in 1915.
However, Krupa said that at the time of both Newton and Einstein, astronomers didn’t know galaxies existed, so modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) was developed to update it with new observations.
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), also known as Milgrom dynamics, after the astrophysicist Mordhai Milgrom who developed it in the early 1980s, argues that normal Newtonian dynamics do not apply to very large scales of galaxies and galaxy clusters , although most physicists do. Astrologers think so.
The main consequence of the modified Newtonian dynamics, Krupa said, is the absence of dark matter, an idea that most astrophysicists reject.
He continued: “Most scientists categorically reject Newton’s modified theory of dynamics, and many serious scientists do not believe that Newton’s modified theory of dynamics is serious and therefore will not consider examining it.”
In their new study, the scientists report observations of the five closest open star clusters to Earth, including the Hyades, an open cluster of hundreds of stars just 150 light-years from our sun.
The team noted that the stars cluster in the tail of the main tides in all five groups, while the greatest departure from Newtonian dynamics is seen in the Hyades group, where there are better measurements, Krupa says.
The observed discrepancies strengthen the thesis of modified Newtonian dynamics, but they cannot be the result of the invisible action of dark matter.
In the case of Hyades, he said: ‘To explain the results, we must have a lot of dark matter out there, like 10 million solar masses. But it’s not in the data at all.
He noted that future studies will use more accurate data on the positions of stars from new space telescopes, such as the European Space Agency’s Gaia.
However, because modified Newtonian dynamics is not widely accepted by many scientists, the results of the new study are controversial.
