Say you're in the taproom at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe. Down the bar, one galactic cluster drunkenly bumps into another. Before you know it, they are entangled in a deadly clash so terrible, they're knocking the very dark matter out of each other!That's what last August, astronomer Douglas Clowe, then at the University of Arizona and his colleagues reported taking place about 3 billion light-years from here in the appropriately-named Bullet Cluster.
But now a Canadian team of researchers led by John W. Moffatt, PhD argues that what the Yanks thought they saw wasn't dark matter at all. Instead, the intermingling of the two vast bodies is resulting in a Modified Gravity event or "MOG" that has bent light passing through the non-dark matter of each cluster from even more distant stellar formations in slightly different ways, giving the appearance, if not the reality of a 'dark" form of matter. Moffatt says their Modified Gravity theory predicts that the force of gravity changes with distance. Is Einstein spinning in his grave?
Back in that restaurant bar, imagine you're watching the two multistellar bodies slowdancing through the lens of your partially filled glass beer mug, while you move it nearer and farther from your eye, and you'll be about right.
Astronomer Clowe and companions stand by their claims, however. That's dark matter out there, they believe.
NASA photo
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