" Now astronomers can study dark matter with less interference from the regular matter background"
There is no such thing as 'Dark Matter' yet.
Would you people please stop talking about it as though it exists?
It is, at this stage, a very crude idea.
There is no evidence of its existence.
We assume 'Dark Matter' exists because our relativistic equations are broken and it's the easiest thing we can imagine to 'fix' the problem - and we conveniently use the theory to make up for some other flaws as well.
There could be many other reasons or characterizations for those phenomena.
Maybe we should wait until there are some nice direct experiments that strongly confirm that the 'nothing there' is actually 'something' :)
If fear 'Dark Matter' is the 21st century equivalent of 'aether'.
A) Yeah, uh, in Science, when we refer to 'things that exist', we usually mean 'materially' and not 'in fantasy'. So no, that it is an 'idea' does not mean 'it exists'.
B) Prove to me that dark matter exists. Characterize it. You can't. The only thing we know is that our equations for gravity don't work, and it would be 'nice' if there were this thing called 'dark matter' out there because it would fit nicely with what we previously understand. So - there's plenty for me to argue with.
C) Dark Matter/Energy theory basically states the Universe is made up of 96% of this interesting material we don't know for sure exists, we have no direct evidence of it, and we really can't characterize it very well.
When a principle is '96% wrong' - maybe it would be better to question the very nature of the principle, instead of trying to fit it to observation?
It's highly possible that our understanding of gravity is just plain wrong. That we can make some inferences in our locality, but in the grand scheme it just falls apart. Obviously, it is wrong to the tune of 96%. Which is not good.
There's going to be a lot to 'argue about' with Dark Matter/Energy for the next couple of generations at least.
There is no such thing as 'Dark Matter' yet.
Would you people please stop talking about it as though it exists?
It is, at this stage, a very crude idea.
There is no evidence of its existence.
We assume 'Dark Matter' exists because our relativistic equations are broken and it's the easiest thing we can imagine to 'fix' the problem - and we conveniently use the theory to make up for some other flaws as well.
There could be many other reasons or characterizations for those phenomena.
Maybe we should wait until there are some nice direct experiments that strongly confirm that the 'nothing there' is actually 'something' :)
If fear 'Dark Matter' is the 21st century equivalent of 'aether'.