Dark matter surveys turn up new satellites … orbiting the Milky Way Dwarf galaxies circling the Milky Way, some with only a few hundred stars, could yield new hints about dark matter, according to boffins from the University of Cambridge and the Dark Energy Survey. The two groups independently discovered the dwarf galaxies while combing over first year's worth of data published by the Dark …
"Just a few hundred stars? Methinks we need a new term."
Yes, we don't want the same thing to happen to them that happened to Pluto. Considered a planet for so very long then suddenly demoted to a minor planet. If we call these things galaxies now, that's what'll happen - at some later date they'll be demoted.
"What about "midget galaxy?""
Fun-size galaxy?
Baryonoic Dark Matter:
I suggest 'globule clusters' for gravitationally-bound (Boki) globules which themselves are composed of gravitationally-bound aggregates of H2 & He at such that their (luminous) stellar metallicity has 'snowed out' to the solid state, sequestering luminous metallicity from detection into icy chondrules, rendering the remaining H2 & He invisible and thus 'dark'. (Molecular hydrogen and helium don't absorb electromagnetic radiation below ultraviolet frequencies, rendering it essentially dark.)
The familiar (Bok) globules of giant molecular clouds are globules in the 'excited state', in which a portion of their stellar metallicity has been sublimed into the gaseous state by exposure to stellar radiation, rendering Bok globules opaque and thus visible. And gaseous stellar metallicity raises the sound crossing time (lowers the speed of sound), promoting Jeans instability. So stellar radiation in the disk plane can cause CDM globule clusters to 'go nuclear' and convert to star clusters.
The Higgs field cannot be massless because the Higgs has mass, therefore the whole Universe even the quantum vacuum has a mass associated with the Higgs field.
The Higgs boson interacts with matter to give mass to other particles.
The Higgs boson is an excitation in the Higgs field producing a mass of approx 126GeV
Every particle with mass interacts with a Higgs boson of mass 126GeV
So add 126GeV to the mass of every particle in the Universe (most of them are in and around galaxies)
Does this not account for Dark matter, or at least some of the extra mass we cannot detect?
Just a though I am a hobbyist with interest not a particle physicist or cosmologist with a PhD
Need an "I am just guessing here" icon
... and as I understood it, the Higgs bosons very quickly degenerated into the Higgs Field soon after the Big Bang but before the "quark soup" period of inflation. This would lead one to suggest it's the integration with the field rather than boson, that gives particles their respective masses.
I use the same caveats as you and would welcome a better explanation from a learned commenter.
Doesn't work like that I'm afraid.
Fields are areas of space where there is a potential difference of some sort, you gain or lose energy when moving a particle through the field that interacts with it. For example with two parallel plates with extra electrons on one of them there will be an electrostatic field between the plates the electrons will 'want' to move to the other plate to balance things out, you can extract the energy by moving half the electrons to the other plate. There isn't anything in the gap as such, the electrons are stuck on the plate.
Secondly, I think that Higgs bosons are pretty rare in the universe these days, it took the LHC a lot of effort to create even the few it needed to detect them and they decayed pretty quickly. Also the Higgs is very heavy at 126GeV, electrons have a rest mass of about 0.5MeV and hadron type particles like protons are about 1Gev, even if you only stuck Higgs to just these you'd end up with way too much mass.
Like yourself I'm only an amateur in this area and I may be a bit off base w.r.t the field side of things.
Edit: @Ashton Black - Yes, like you said.
But if normal matter is just 5% of the mass of universe and therefore dark matter is the remaining 95%, shouldn't there be a lot of dark matter a hell of a lot closer than 100K light years?
Now, I know we can't see it - for obvious reasons (geddit) - but shouldn't the gravitational effect be more noticeable?
It's actually the other way around. It's the gravitation on large scale structure of the universe that they noticed that led the scientists to conclude that there wasn't enough visible mass to account for it and in addition Dark Matter accounts for about 28% (approx.) of the total matter/energy in the universe, but coupled with Dark Energy adds up to the 95% you mentioned.
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