The Elephant in the Universe

Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter

Govert Schilling 2022 Bvtn Lib 523.1126 SCH

( To do: cosmology tutorial https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_01.htm )

A well written, mind changing book, decent reference material. I might purchase a used copy, even though local libraries have copies. Washington County libraries also have Deep Space (2014), Ripples in Spacetime (2017) and Constellations (2019), and Multnomah County has Galaxies (2019).

History of the idea of dark matter. The 900 pound gorilla in the room (so far) is that there is a lot more invisible gravitational mass at the galactic scale than does not interact electromagnetically.


Breaking News

This book almost had me convinced, until I read the 13 Dec 2023 issue of Science magazine, with a short article about black holes in giant stars, pointing at a quite-readable article in The Astrophysical Journal, 2023 December 13.

Solar Evolution Models with a Central Black Hole by Bellinger et. al. describes stellar evolution when a primordial black hole is trapped inside a star. The black hole's accretion creates Hawking radiation, and it grows slowly but exponentially, shortening the star's lifetime and eventually collapsing it into a stellar-mass black hole.

I wonder how this affects the luminosities of nearby newer galaxies versus distant older galaxies, and whether changing galactic luminosity has been misinterpreted as anomalous red shift and dark matter expansion.


ElephantUniverse (last edited 2024-01-25 07:51:28 by KeithLofstrom)