In the 1970s, Isaac Newton's theories were thoroughly analyzed. This happened after a woman astrophysicist discovered a kind of 'anomaly' in a nearby galaxy.
Newton is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of all time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. First published in 1687, his book The Mathematical Foundations of Natural Philosophy describes the three laws of motion and the law of universal attraction. His work, which became the basis of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, suggested that the farther a planet is from the Sun, the slower it rotates due to the gravitational curve in the universe.
But an astrophysicist from the seventies came to question everything that had been taught for the past 300 years, when stars in a distant galaxy were moving at a constant speed. This is covered in the movie 'The Secret of Dark Matter' on Amazon Prime.
Why are astrophysicists convinced of the existence of mysterious, invisible matter in the universe?
Since the universe would not be what it is without dark matter, there would not be enough gravity for stars and galaxies to rotate at the speeds that we observe.
This story began in the thirties, but this question was not asked until the seventies by the American scientist Vera Rubin. Vera, a young mother of three, decided to specialize in an area where competition from her male colleagues was not too fierce.
Vera Rubin
Instead of observing black holes, she turned her interests towards the stars of the Andromeda galaxy. Sir Isaac Newton taught us that in our solar system, the farther a planet is from the sun, the slower it rotates. Therefore, Vera expected that the speed of rotation of stars in the Andromeda galaxy would be within the same decreasing curve, but this turned out not to be so.
The speed of rotation of the stars remained constant, regardless of their distance from the center of the galaxy
Dr. Saul Perlmutter, one of the founders of the theory of dark matter, noted that it was Rubin who first noticed signs of the existence of dark matter in galaxies:
'She expected to see the stars move slower and slower as they move away from the center of the galaxy, because they will feel less gravitational attraction. However, this did not happen – they continued to 'go' further and further at a consistently high speed.
'What was true for the solar system was not at all true for this galaxy. This put before Rubin the question of whether to modify Newton's theory, or to talk about the discovery of new extremely heavy matter that would create the necessary gravity for these equations to correspond to reality. '
'Shy Vera did not dare contradict the great Newton and therefore chose the second solution – the hidden mass, which allows the stars to rotate just as quickly, without scattering throughout the universe.'
However, many scientists of our time are already questioning the existence of the darkest matter. Among them was the French physicist Etienne Klein:
“The idea behind dark matter is that there are anomalies in the behavior and dynamics of galaxies. To understand them, we assume that there is invisible dark matter that affects the motion of galaxies. But the origin and nature of this issue remains unknown. '
Thus, scientists are still confused by the very existence of dark matter, which they believe makes up roughly 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Many, inspired by observations that do not fit this theory, still argue about various modifications of Newton's laws of gravity.
The theories put forward include modified Newtonian dynamics, tensor-vector-scalar gravity, or entropic gravity, which attempt to explain all forms of matter in the universe, not just most of the 'dark' matter.
Source: history.com
Edition and translation: Kolupaev Dmitry
