Astronomers have found evidence that may challenge the laws of gravity and could affect our understanding of the universe. It's possible that the finding supports a controversial idea that does away with dark matter.
The researchers were able to find this evidence by observing open star clusters, or groups of up to a few hundred stars. There are trails of stars in open star clusters. Many more stars are sitting in the overall direction of their travel through space than behind them, according to the researchers' observations. The law of universal gravitation states that there should be the same number of stars in both tails.
It's significant, according to the University of Bonn's physicist. There is a big effect.
There was a tidal tail of whipped-away stars.
According to the study, the observations are evidence of modifiedNewtonian dynamics, an alternative theory of gravity to the universally accepted universal law of gravity.
Dark matter, an invisible substance thought to exert a powerful pull on the universe's visible matter, is not enough for this distribution of stars.
He said that this is a game-changing event. The work done on the universe assumes dark matter andgravity.
The universal law of gravitation states that every particle has a force proportional to their mass and square of their distance. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity was based on this law.
MOND was developed to bring it up to date with observations because at the time of Einstein andNewton, the astronomer didn't know that there was a universe.
Although most astrophysicists agree that regularNewtonian dynamics don't apply on the very large scales of galaxies and galactic clusters, MOND argues that this is not the case.
Dark matter doesn't exist because of MOND. He said that the majority of scientists don't like MOND. Many serious scientists don't think MOND is serious and so they wouldn't consider looking at it.
The authors reported observations of five of the closest open stellar clusters to Earth, including the Hyades, a spherical group of hundreds of stars that is only 150 light years from our sun.
The researchers found that stars had accumulated in the leading tidal tail in all five of the clusters and that the biggest discrepancy from regularNewtonian dynamics was seen in the Hyades cluster.
The observed discrepancies are not a result of dark matter.
He said that in order to explain the results there would have to be a clump of dark matter. It isn't in the data.
He said that future studies will use more precise data on stars from new space telescopes.
The new study's findings are not well-received by many scientists.
In an email to Live Science, she said she was happy to see researchers working on simulations of MOND.
She said that the paper uses an approximate calculation that needs to be confirmed and that they haven't quantified how large the disagreement is. I don't know how good this argument is.
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