Comment on If dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, what happens when light hits it?
phr@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days agodark matter is a stand in, not a known type of particle. astronomers realized, that in galaxies there had to be way more mass than is visible due to the movement of stars within. but since it couldn’t be detected in any other way than through its gravitational influence, it was called dark matter.
this person has given the best answer so far. there is no thing we could identify as dark matter. the concept of it is more like a roadmap, a question to be answered.
Ziggurat@jlai.lu 1 day ago
While I’ve bee away from dark matter physics for a while, we do have a couple of theoretical candidates for dark matter, and data from cosmology and particle accelerator, somehow describing the kind of proporties that a dark matter particle would have.
And it includes a low cross section, meaning that most likely it won’t interact with light (see it as smaller than light as an over simplification). This makes detection pretty hard both in direct and indirect way