Written by |
Khaled Younes |
Wednesday 23 November 2022 – 06:00 PM
Astronomers observing star clusters in our galaxy have discovered evidence that controversially defies Newton’s laws of gravity and could upend our understanding of the universe. This puzzling finding may support a controversial idea that dark matter should be completely eliminated. Scientists arrived at this evidence by observing open star clusters, that is, tightly bound groups of up to a few hundred stars within larger galaxies.
Open star clusters have trails of stars, known as tidal tails, in front and behind them.
The tidal tails are a thin, elongated region of interstellar stars and gas that extends into space from the galaxy.
Scientists’ observations indicate that the front tail in these star clusters always contains a much larger number of stars close to the cluster than the back tail. This casts doubt on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which suggests that there must be the same number of stars in both the fore and aft tidal tails.
“It’s very significant,” astrophysicist Pavel Krupa of the University of Bonn told Live Science. “There is a huge impact.”
Krupa added that this uneven distribution of stars is noticeable, but not severe enough to involve any kind of dark matter – an invisible substance that is believed to exert a strong gravitational force on visible matter in the universe.
He continued, “This is basically a game-changer. This destroys all the work done on galaxies and cosmology that posits dark matter and Newtonian gravity.”
Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation, published in 1687, states that every particle in the universe attracts 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 theory of general relativity, which was published in 1915.
But 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 the new observations.
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Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), also known as Milgrom dynamics, after astrophysicist Mordhai Milgrom, who developed it in the early 1980s, argues that normal Newtonian dynamics does not apply to very large scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies – although most physicists do. The astrologers think they do.
The main result of modified Newtonian dynamics, Krupa said, is the absence of dark matter — an idea most astrophysicists reject.
He continued, “The majority of scientists reject Newton’s modified theory of dynamics completely. Many serious scientists do not believe that Newton’s modified theory of dynamics is serious, and therefore they will not consider looking at it.”
In their new study, scientists reported observations of five of the closest open star clusters to Earth, including Hyades – an open star cluster of hundreds of stars that is only about 150 light-years from our sun.
The team noted that stars accumulated in the main tidal tail in all five groups, while the greatest discrepancy from Newtonian dynamics was observed in the Hyades group, where there are better measurements, says Krupa.
The observed discrepancies reinforce the case for modified Newtonian dynamics, but they cannot be the result of the invisible action of dark matter.
In the case of Hyades, he said, “we would have to have a mass of dark matter in there, like 10 million solar masses, to explain the results. But it’s not in the data at all.”
He noted that future studies will use more accurate data on star positions 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.
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