RT reports that astronomers observing star clusters in our galaxy have found evidence that it controversially defies Newton’s laws of gravity and could shake up our understanding of the universe.
This discovery supports a controversial idea that gets rid of dark matter completely, and scientists have reached this evidence by observing open star clusters, that is, interconnected finite groups of up to a few hundred stars located in larger galaxies.
Open star clusters have trails of stars, known as tidal tails, in front of and behind them.
Tidal tails are thin, elongated regions of interstellar gas and stars that extend out into space from the galaxy.
Scientists’ observations indicate that the front tail in these clusters of stars always contains a much larger number of stars close to the cluster than the rear tail, and this casts doubt on Newton’s universal law of gravitation, which indicates that there must be the same number of stars . stars. in both tails.
“It’s very important,” astrophysicist Pavel Krupa of the University of Bonn told Live Science. “There is a huge impact.”
This uneven distribution of stars is noticeable, Krupa added, but not severe enough to involve any kind of dark matter — invisible matter 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 the universe 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.
But Krupa said that in the time of Newton and Einstein, astronomers didn’t know galaxies existed, so modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) was developed, updating the new observations.
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), also known as Milgrom dynamics, after astrophysicist Mordhai Milgrom, who developed it in the early 1980s, argues that ordinary Newtonian dynamics does not apply to very large scales of galaxies and galaxy clusters – even though most physics does. Astrologers believe that they do.
The main consequence of modified Newtonian dynamics, Krupa said, is the absence of dark matter — an idea most astrophysicists reject.
And he continued, “The majority of scientists completely reject Newton’s modified theory of dynamics, and many serious scientists do not believe that Newton’s modified theory of dynamics is a serious theory, and therefore they do not consider looking at it.”
In their new study, scientists report observations of five of the closest open star clusters to Earth, including the Hyades – an open star cluster of hundreds of stars only about 150 light-years from our Sun.
The team noted that stars accumulated in the main tidal tail in all five clusters, while the greatest discrepancy from Newtonian dynamics was observed in the Hyades cluster, where the best measurements are, says Krupa.
The observed discrepancies reinforce the case for altered Newtonian dynamics, but they cannot be the result of the invisible action of dark matter.
In the case of HAIDS, he said, “we would have to have a mass of dark matter in there, like 10 million solar masses, to explain the results. But it’s 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.