Dark matter - yes, MOND - no.

[Andrzej Marecki]

----- Forwarded message from physnews w aip.org -----

THE CONVENTIONAL THEORY OF DARK MATTER just got some potent support
from a new batch of observations to be reported by scientists from
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) this week at a meeting in the
Canary Islands.  One of the main reasons for believing in the
existence of non-luminous matter is that the motions of galaxies
within galaxy clusters and the motions of matter around individual
galaxies seems to defy conventional celestial mechanics. Either
plenty of extra (but unconventional) mass must lurk in the vicinity
of the galaxies (the dark matter theory) or the known laws of
physics might be in need of amendment (the theory known as modified
Newtonian dynamics, or MOND).  Scrutinizing a subset of 3000
galaxies (from Sloan's inventory of 250,000 galaxies) with satellite
galaxies in tow, the researchers' profile of satellite velocities
supported the dark matter theory and discounted the MOND idea.  (See
the Sloan website at www.sdss.org )


----- End of forwarded message from physnews w aip.org -----

-- 
Andrzej