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Dark matter may be an illusion caused by the quantum vacuum


One of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics is that galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than expected, given the amount of existing baryonic (normal) matter. The fast orbits require a larger central mass than the nearby stars, dust, and other baryonic objects can provide, leading scientists to propose that every galaxy resides in a halo of (as yet undetectable) dark matter made of non-baryonic particles. As one of many scientists who have become somewhat skeptical of dark matter, CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic has proposed that the illusion of dark matter may be caused by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.


“The key message of my paper is that dark matter may not exist and that phenomena attributed to dark matter may be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum,” Hajdukovic told PhysOrg.com. “The future experiments and observations will reveal if my results are only (surprising) numerical coincidences or an embryo of a new scientific revolution.”



Like his previous study featured on PhysOrg about a cyclic universe successively dominated by matter and antimatter, Hajdukovic’s paper on a dark matter alternative is also an attempt to understand cosmological phenomena without assuming the existence of unknown forms of matter and energy, or of unknown mechanisms for inflation and matter-antimatter asymmetry. In the case of the fast rotational curves of galaxies, he explains that there are currently two schools of understanding the phenomenon.


Lees verder: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-dark-i...tum-vacuum.html


Bron: PhysOrg