RT reports that astronomers observing star clusters in our galaxy have found evidence that it controversially defies Newton’s laws of gravity and could change our understanding of the universe.
This enigmatic finding supports the controversial notion that it gets rid of dark matter entirely. Scientists have come up with this evidence by observing open star clusters, 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 up to outdoor space from the galaxy.
Scientists’ observations indicate that the front tail of these clusters always contains a much larger number of stars near the cluster than the trailing tail, defying Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which suggests 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 uneven distribution of stars is visible, but not intense enough to include any kind of dark matter — the invisible matter that is thought to exert a strong gravitational force on visible matter in the universe.
He continued: “This is basically a game-changer and 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 space is attracted towards 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.
However, Krupa said that in the time of both Newton and Einstein, astronomers did not know that 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 does not apply to very large scales of galaxies and galaxy clusters — although most physicists do. Astrologers think so.
The main consequence of modified Newtonian dynamics, Krupa said, is the absence of dark matter — an idea most astrophysicists reject.
And 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 looking at it.”
In their new study, scientists report observations of the five closest open star clusters to Earth, including the Hyades, an open cluster of hundreds of stars only about 150 light-years from our sun.
The team noted that stars cluster in the tail of the main tides in all five groups, while the biggest departure from Newtonian dynamics is observed in the Hyades group, where there are better measurements, Krupa says.
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 the Hyades, he said, “To explain the results, we have to have a lot of dark matter out there, like 10 million solar masses. But it is 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.