Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting The Milky Way Nix Newton

It turns out that we don't know everything about the universe.  Shocking, we know, but you'd be surprised how often science writers, politicians, or intelligent design idiots confuse "non-omniscience" with "everything is WRONG!"   Now some are saying that Newton screwed up, but at least their evidence is awesome: dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way!

First off, Newton was never "wrong" - he was "right as far as it was humanly possible to be in the seventeenth century."  You have to remember that he defined all the motion he ever saw with a pencil, and when he discovered the math didn't exist he just spent a chunk of his life inventing it - meanwhile, you use a supercomputer system to watch cats falling out of trees.

There wasn't a lot of near-light-speed motion at the time, nor any neutrinos, and it's important to remember that the people who build bridges don't go with general relativity or quantum mechanics - it's all the three laws of force, baby.  You only find you need further theorios when you look outside, and Professor Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn and colleagues have looked as outside as you can reasonably get:  analyzing the motions of dwarf galaxies, thousands of starts orbiting the entire Milky Way.  There they've found some fascinating contradictions.

Instead of being uniformly distributed around the Milky Way, the dwarf galaxies orbit in a plane - almost like a set of planets.  The group's calculations show that these galaxettes can't contain any dark matter - but then, observations of the orbital speed of the same shows that they MUST contain dark matter, as the extant material isn't enough to explain their velocities.

Clearly, something is wrong.  There's always a chance that the human calculations are the problem - after all, you can't accuse the universe of being "wrong" when it's already there, doing things, and doing them a quadrillion times bigger than you can even imagine.  Basing calculations on something you've never seen is always going to be tricky (try "divide by a unicorn"), but that's the entire point.

In any other field, highlighting how wrong you are is the worst thing you can do - in science, it's all about helping us find out new things.  And if you know something you thought you knew is wrong, that's even better - there's something new in a place we already looked!

Posted by Luke McKinney. Related Galaxy posts:

Harvard-Smithsonian Center Reports Massive Black Holes Roaming the Milky Way (VIDEO)
18 Billion Suns -A Galaxy Classic: Biggest Black Hole in Universe Discovered—and it’s BIG
Neutron Stars: New Discovery Proves Einstein's Space-Time Predictions
Mystery Neutron Star Discovered
Andromeda Galaxy & Its Mystery Core: Destined to Merge With the Milky Way?
Neutron Stars & The Physics of Star Trek
New, Revised Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Black Holes Key to Mapping the Evolution of the Universe

Newton Wrong?

Comments

[Richard Paez]

Anyone who says Newton was "wrong" is severely misinformed -- Kuhn would be disappointed. Great Article, by the way.

[Doug O]

Great article by a seeming "small minded" individual. Why did the author feel a need to go outside the scope of the artical just to call a particular group "idiots"? If you don't agree with their views fine. But why put on display the "idiotic" and "small minded" nature of your "name calling" of the group? Where is their belief causing you pain? I don't ask you to "respect them". You have shown your disdain in your words but why ruin the enjoyment of a good article for your readers with your prejudicial remark?

[Jas]

Perhaps when the collisions that spawned the dwarf galaxies stripped them of their dark matter it left filaments behind that radiate like spokes. These may then bind the stars in some way dragging them all along together. The dwarf galaxies theselves could be locked into a plane around the milky way in much the same way and that is why they have not migrated to where we expect them to be?

[Karen McAllister]

Interesting quote from one of the astronauts: "Everything that we see in the universe, everything that Earth is made out of, that we're made out of, the stuff of the universe, matter, only accounts for 4 percent of what we now know to be in the universe. And the other 96 percent, we know very little about." ~ from a tampabay.com report today. Puts it all in perspective.
There are some amazing Hubble photos in this special feature:
http://tinyurl.com/cs5sz4

[dmarx]

Dear Doug,

You use quotation marks too much. If someone is actually doing something, you don't need to describe it in quotes. It's not necessary because they're actually doing it. It's not just in your head. It wasn't implied name calling. It was actual name calling. But maybe you know what you're doing. Maybe he should "respect" them.

[Neil]

Fine article? Not really. Apart from the unnecessary idiot-bashing, the article is very low on actual information and spends most of it's time talking about being wrong and other elementary school ideas.

I think we can assume that most people visiting 'the daily galaxy' already have some idea how science works, thank you.

What we don't know, and what I came here to find out, was what the orbits of dwarf galaxies have to do with defying the laws of physics as Newton wrote them.

And for that, you devote a ridiculous ONE paragraph. Come on, you can do a lot better than that. You can summarise all the idealogical stuff in a single paragraph and then devote five or six to the topic.

It would still be depressingly shallow but compared to this, anything's an improvement.

[Devon]

When they calculate what the speed of what the dwarf galaxy should be they determine the force of gravity on the galaxy and then determine what velocity would counter that force. Now when they determine the force do they use the gravitational constant G? as in Fg = Gm1m2/r^2. So why couldn't it be possible that G isn't a constant number, but different types of matter produce different amounts of gravitational force? Could this account for all the "dark matter" and "dark energy" that scientists hypothesize must exist for the rotation of galaxies and the expansion of the universe to make sense?

[Nikola]

Two words people Plasma Cosmology.

www.thunderbolts.info

[Michael Lonergan]

This is so discriminatory! Dwarf Galaxies deserve just as much respect as Spirals, Ellipticals and other Galaxies! What next? Dwarf Galaxy tossing!?

[Jon Voisey]

I agree that this article wasn't very well written (although I don't think it's in appropriate to call ID proponents idiots or liars since their own statements make this painfully obvious). There's not much on the actual source or even who the researchers are.

[Ivar Nielsen]

It IS a great article by all means! And I cannot se the article is rediculing anyone.
Only traditional thinking cosmologists and physisists can think otherwise.
And if no one is thinking the untraditionally thoughts, we NEVER find oot what´s really going on, do we?

- In my opinion, we must rekognize 2 things in order to find out:

1. The movement in a galaxy can go both ways, inwards and outwards. That is: What we call "Gravity" regarding galaxies, is just a smooth movement either on its way concentrating a gas and dustcloud in a swirl - or/and later on another smother movement going outwards, spreading larger melted lumps of gas and matter, which becomes Stars and Planets and so on.

That means: The laws of "gravity" on the cosmic scale is totally wrong.

2. In our local Milky Way galaxy, the movement actually goes outwards from the center. When a spiralling supergalaxy spawnes out these larger spheres of gas and matter from the barred jets in the center, this outburst also will create minor spiralling centres around in the supergalactic area surroundings.

It is, so to speak, a large spiralling structure which spawnes smaller spiralling babies.

That also means, if right, that our Solar system was born directly out from the center of our galaxy.

How difficult can it be?

NB: I know my points of views will be taken as being very far out by most scholared scientists - but then: It´s not me having any troubles understanding the obvius.

Natural Philosopher
Ivar Nielsen
nielsen.ivar@gmail.com
www.cosmology-unified.net

[Michael Gmirkin]

"The group's calculations show that these galaxettes can't contain any dark matter - but then, observations of the orbital speed of the same shows that they MUST contain dark matter, as the extant material isn't enough to explain their velocities.

Clearly, something is wrong."

Clearly...

Astronomers / astrophysicists took the wrong path around the time of Zwicky and Rubin. The gravity-only theory was clearly falsified based upon the dearth of OBERVABLE matter.

The only two obvious choices were to posit additional UNSEEN matter that cannot be detected (a la "The Emperor's New Clothes") or admit that gravitational theories describing galactic models were falsified / inadequate for the task and look for a newer better explanation. Zwicky, Rubin, et al took the former path. The latter might have been more painful but ultimately the better route. Dark Matter is much like an extra epicycle (one among many to explain anomalous data).

I don't fault them for their error. Alternative answers were not then at hand. Today they probably are, though not widely read.

(Evolution of the Plasma Universe: I. Double Radio Galaxies, Quasars, and Extragalactic Jets)
http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloadsCosmo/Peratt86TPS-I.pdf

(Evolution of the Plasma Universe: II. The Formation of Systems of Galaxies)
http://plasmascience.net/tpu/downloadsCosmo/Peratt86TPS-II.pdf

When PIC (Particle-In-Cell) simulations are run based solely on the the known laws and behavior of plasma and electric current (parallel currents, actually), galaxy formation and rotation curves are a natural consequence, no dark matter required.

That such recent revelations as those from nearby dwarf galaxies should be contradictory is not really a surprise.

It was only a matter of time before the logical inconsistencies in the gravito-dark-matter paradigm would reveal themselves in the form of statements like "the dwarf galaxies CAN'T have dark matter" & "the dwarf galaxies MUST have dark matter" coexisting. Logically, you can't have it both ways. They are mutually exclusive propositions. Either dark matter exists in the dwarf galaxies or it doesn't.

I suggest that alternative models such as Peratt's should be explored further and not dismissed out of hand as so many appear to do.

[Jon Voisey]

Please. Not the Plasma Physics crap. It's so stupid it's not even wrong.

[Want_to_become_Astronaut-_Astrophysics major]

A few things- commenting on this article and some of the other comments here:

Article: poorly written, Newton isn't wrong here. The two dwarf galaxies- Large and Small Magellanic Clouds have been coming in close contact with the Milky Way for years now, and the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy is currently "crashing" into the MW disk. They're getting sucked in by the gravitational pull from the MWG (milky way galaxy)

Comments: get over the quotation "idoit remarks" quotations, its not the point.

Jas- your hypothesis doesn't make much sense because dark matter is what "hugs in" galaxies- it lies at the outermost edges- most of the mass of a galaxy is at its outer edges due to its content of dark matter, and of course the black hole in the center of every galaxy helps fuel the angular momentum aka the spiral of star-stuff swirling around the center, but if the Dark Matter were to be pulled from the dwarf galaxy by the milky way, then the whole dwarf galaxy would go with it.

Devon- thats a good question. But they all still use the gravitational constant G- their gravitational forces differ because their MASS and their RADII differ.

Mr. National Philospher- I'm a bit confused by your statement: "movement in a galaxy can go both ways, inwards and outwards." That's not true for spiral galaxies, and the rest of your arguements seem misleading to me. The movement of galaxies and stars within such is not outward. Every body that makes up a galaxy orbits around its center, meaning acceleration inward, in a sense "falling towards" the center but held up my tangential velocity. Our solar system and other stars are born from clumps of cool molecular clouds that are "activivated" by shockwaves that pass through the galaxtic disk of which come from exploding supernovae. There's also no such thing as a "supergalaxy" and the dwarf galaxies around the MWG are not spiral babies coming from the MWG- They are actually small galaxies that have been pulled closer to the MWG by the its gravitational attraction (which is by in large quite strong due to the size of the MWG compared to that of the dwarf galaxies orbiting it). Also, there aren't barred "jets" in the center of the MWG- it is a barred spiral galaxy of which the BARS are the matter that is getting sucked into the Supermassive Black Hole at the center of our galaxy.

Michael Gmirkin- good point, I've heard that arguement been made before. Could possibly be true.

P.S.- cite one of my main sources of knowledge- The Cosmic Perspective- Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, Voit. I suggest reading it all, but ideally for this article- Ch19-23 will help clear the air a bit.