The hypothesis of the mysterious (and wholly non-existent) Dark Matter has been dealt another heavy blow by new analysis of the rotation of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. The data in the analysis, collected by the GAIA mapping satellite, show that dark matter is not needed to explain the galaxy’s rotation velocity. Combined with existing data on the motion of plasma in the outer reaches of the galaxy, the new analysis, circulated online this month, confirms that the motion of those galactic outskirts is controlled by magnetic plasma filaments, not the imaginary dark matter. Enormously scaled-down versions of these plasma filaments are crucial to the achievement of fusion energy and are used in LPPFusion’s FF-2B device.
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Spiral galaxy “rotation curves” have been pointed to as one of two key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter. A “rotation curve” is what astronomers call the graph of the rotation velocity of a region of a galaxy plotted against the distance to the center of the galaxy, as in the graph below. (The other piece of evidence cited for dark matter involves clusters of galaxies, which we’ll be discussing in a near-future report.) It has long been known that in these curves, velocity rises to a plateau that extends far from galactic centers. For gravitating disks like the spirals, whose mass is concentrated towards the center, the velocity curves should decrease, not rise or plateau. So theoretical astrophysicists have long argued that only a mysterious dark matter, in a large halo surrounding the visible galaxy, can account for this flat, or even rising velocity trend, since the larger the velocity at a given radius, the larger the gravitating mass inside that radius. This phenomenon has been observed in our own galaxy, the Milky Way - see the orange line in the graph below.
Rotation Curves Graph: New data from a billion-star survey shows that rotation velocity of stars in the Milky Way galaxy (blue line) decreases with increasing distance from the galactic center, as would be expected with no dark matter. In contrast the rotation velocity of plasma clouds (orange line) increases with distance, clearly showing they must be confined by magnetic fields as well as gravitation.
These observations were made by measuring the Doppler shifts of radio-frequency emission from gas or plasma in our galaxy and other galaxies. The radio radiation can be observed out to large distances from the galactic centers, where the stars were too few and faint to observe. But as early as 25 years ago, researchers began to measure the velocities of stars in the outer reaches of our own galaxy, where stars can be observed to large radii due to our closeness to them. They found that the stars were moving a lot slower than the gas. Since gravity affects all matter equally, that meant the high gas velocities could not be due to gravity alone. Other researchers, starting with Hannes Alfven, had pointed out that magnetic fields could be confining the plasmas in huge filaments, accounting for their high velocities with no need for dark matter.
Now that hypothesis has been dramatically confirmed with the release of the new analyses. Contained in a paper by H.F. Wang(Centro Research Enrico Fermi, Rome) , Z. Chrobakova, (Comenius University, Bratislava), M. Lopez-Corredoira (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife) and F. Sylos-Labini (Centro Research Enrico Fermi, Rome), the analysis uses velocities from almost one billion stars in the galaxy (about 1% of ALL stars in the galaxy). For each star, the GAIA satellite has been able to measure its radial velocity from Doppler shifts, its velocity in the plane of the sky from ultraprecision location measurements, and its distance. The distance is measured from the parallax-caused change in position of the star on the sky as the earth travels in its orbit around the sun.
From this enormous mass of data, the researchers derived the rotation curve for stars in our galaxy - the blue curve in the graph above. Unlike the well-known rotation curve from gas, the stellar rotation curve actually decreases with increasing radius, just as would be expected without any dark matter. The stellar curve diverges increasingly from the gas curve, so that at the largest radii, the stellar rotation velocities are almost 30% less than the gas velocities. The gas - really plasma - is flowing past the stars at a zippy 70 km/s. This proves that the plasma velocity measurements can’t reflect gravitational fields alone and must involve magnetic confinement as well.
Since we have no reason to believe that there is anything peculiar about our Milky Way galaxy, this new analysis strongly implies that the radio-frequency-based rotation curves for all other galaxies also must involve magnetic confinement as well as gravitational confinement.
In a follow-up paper still under preparation, the researchers use the new rotation velocity curve to calculate that the actual mass of the Milky Way is 160 billion times the mass of our Sun. This is only twice as much as the visible mass in stars. The rest is likely contained in the remnants of burnt-out stars, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, and in dense cold gas that is too dim to observe. There is no need for dark matter, and no room for it either! In the meantime, more observations of the magnetic filaments that confine the plasma are being made - which we will cover in future reports.