MI504: The idea that Dark Matter is different from ordinary matter is a Giant Misconception

MI504: Miscon Four:

The idea that Dark Matter is different from ordinary matter is a Giant Misconception

David Noel
<davidn@aoi.com.au>
Ben Franklin Centre for Theoretical Research
PO Box 27, Subiaco, WA 6008, Australia.

What is Dark Matter? The term "Dark Matter" was invented by the brilliant Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s to represent a source of gravitational attraction in distant galaxies.

Zwicky noted the rotation rates of some of these galaxies, and showed that the distribution and masses of all the stars known in a given galaxy was markedly insufficient to explain its rotational behaviour -- the galaxy had to contain a lot of some substance in a form which could not be seen in ordinary telescopes, but which had the gravitational properties of matter. Zwicky coined the label "Dark Matter" for this unknown substance.

Here is an extract from what a conventional source, Wikipedia, has to say about Dark Matter [1].

"Dark matter is a form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe and about a quarter of its total energy density.

The majority of dark matter is thought to be non-baryonic in nature, possibly being composed of some as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles. Its presence is implied in a variety of astrophysical observations, including gravitational effects which cannot be explained by accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen.

For this reason, most experts think dark matter to be abundant in the universe and to have had a strong influence on its structure and evolution. Dark matter is called dark because it does not appear to interact with observable electromagnetic radiation, such as light, and is thus invisible to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, making it extremely difficult to detect using existing astronomical instruments.

Primary evidence for dark matter comes from calculations showing many galaxies would fly apart instead of rotating, or would not have formed or move as they do, if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter.

Because dark matter has not yet been observed directly, if it exists, it must barely interact with ordinary baryonic matter and radiation, except through gravity. The primary candidate for dark matter is some new kind of elementary particle that has not yet been discovered, in particular, weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs).

Many experiments to directly detect and study dark matter particles are being actively undertaken, but none have yet succeeded."

There is an unfortunate thing about scientific theories -- once an accepted idea goes"off-track", but is not rejected, researchers devise more and more elaborate stories and gimmicky explanations in the face of new discrepancies in the theory. The pile of bullshit (aka hogwash, bunkum) so created becomes so high, that few later observers are bold enough to challenge convention, and point out that the pile is obscuring the proper view.

And so with theories about Dark Matter. But now, simple and (in hindsight) obvious explanations are readily available, not involving "WIMPs" or any form of "non-baryonic material".

Part 1. Distant Dark Matter is just a wrong understanding --
because the light from AGNs and quasars is only visible from certain directions Most of the stars within our own galaxy are normal Fusion Stars, hot balls of gas generating energy from fusion of atomic nuclei, and emitting this light in all directions,

But most of the more distant sources of light received on Earth are from Vortex Stars -- all the classes called quasars, AGNs (Active Galactic Nuclei), supermassive black holes, and other names applied to those with certain characteristics (magnetars, neutron stars, white dwarfs). All are essentially the rapidly-rotating cores of galaxies or transitioned fusion stars.

Collectively called Vortex Stars, these objects emit light (and other-wavelength radiation and matter) as tightly-collimated beams along their axes of rotation. These beams resemble laser beams, although rather more complex.

In the earlier days of classifying these quasars (the name is from "quasi-stellar object"), they were given names such as Seyfert Galaxies, Radio Galaxies, and Blazars. Subsequently it was realized that all these objects were similar in nature, differing only in the angle at which they were viewed. Blazars, easily the brightest of all these classes, were Vortex Stars which happened to be aligned with their axes pointing straight towards Earth, or nearly so.

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Figure MI504-F1 Quasar galaxy or black hole viewed from different directions.. From [B].

There is more detail on this at "UG102: Understanding Vortex Stars White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, and AGNs" [A] .

Viewing quasars and other Vortex Stars In Figure F1, it will be apparent that a Vortex Star beam is only obviously seen when viewed directly, along or very close to one of its axial beams (appears as a "blazar"). Off this axis, as with a laser beam, the beam will show up in visible light only where it happens to be slightly scattered by passing through clouds of dust or gas. In Figure F1, these scattering areas are labelled "Radio jets" -- they may also be called "Relatavistic Jets".

Although tightly collimated (confined into a narrow beam), vortex star beams will show some degree of spread, and the amount of this spread will determine the proportion of the viewing sphere over which they can be seen.

Figure MI504-F2 Vortex Stars are only visible close to emission axes.. From [C].

Figure F2 is a diagram illustrating the effect of vortex beam spread (much exaggerated for clarity). Over the viewing hemisphere of one of the axial jets, the AGN or Vortex Star is visible only in the circle of radius "r" to the right. Outside this circle, the AGN will not be seen, it will appear "dark".

The actual spread of axial beams can be estimated from the spread of relativistic jets from the M87 Galaxy axial beam, and putting this result into the appropriate equation gives a value for the viewing circle proportion of just over 10% of the hemisphere surface [D].

What this means, in practical terms, is that if you search the skies for very distant stars (the majority of which are whole-galaxy AGNs), only 10% of them will have their axial beams pointing close enough to your line of eye for them to be visible. The remaining 90% will not be visible -- they will appear to be "dark matter"

Here then is a simple explanation of Dark Matter which is virtually unassailable.

Part 2. Closer Dark Matter is just ordinary matter in space outside solar systems The treatment given above in Part 1 is satisfactory in explaining the gravitational behaviour of distant galaxies, the area which gave rise to the whole concept of Dark Matter. But there are other indications of dark matter which arise much closer, within our own galaxy.

According to Google [11[, indications of dark matter in our galaxy come from its gravitational effects: the unexpectedly fast rotation of stars in the outer parts of the Milky Way, the detection of gamma rays emanating from the galactic center that could result from dark matter particle annihilation, and the observed gravitational potential of the galaxy, which includes a large halo of unseen dark matter surrounding the visible disk.

Surrounding our Solar System there is a mess of bodies smaller than stars, known as the "Oort Cloud".

Figure MI504-F3. The Oort Cloud. From NASA.

The existence of such an entity has been known for a long time, but only recently has a fairly detailed picture started to emerge. The Oort Cloud is the source of "long-period comets" -- comets which swing into the Solar System on apparently highly-elliptical orbits. Unlike shorter-period comets (like Halley's Comet, which returns regularly), the long-period comets appear once, circle the Sun, and shoot off into interstellar space, never to be seen again.

Until relatively recent times, these comets were almost the only way of gaining information about the Oort Cloud. Comets have quite low masses, so if the Oort Cloud only contained comets, its total mass might be guessed to be tiny compared to the mass of our Sun. Now a far more detailed understanding of the Oort Cloud is emerging, dependent on two quite different modes of investigation.

Planetary bodies beyond the Solar System Our Solar System has has an outer boundary called the Heliosphere, like a giant bubble. It is a real boundary, rather than an arbitrary one, for at least two reasons.

Figure MI504-F4. The Heliosphere. From NASA.

First, within the Heliosphere, all the planets, asteroids, and comets are under the overwhelming gravitational control of the Sun. Beyond its edge, the Heliopause, the Sun is only one of the gravitational regimes acting on Oort Cloud bodies -- with inner Oort Cloud objects, the Sun's influence is still strong, but further out into the Cloud, objects will no longer be "orbiting" the Sun, their movements will be more and more independent.

Second, some local conditions have been shown to alter on passing through the Heliopause. The space probe Voyager 1 crossed the Heliopause in 2012, and its instruments revealed that it had crossed a boundary in the direction of the local magnetic field. There is more on this in "UGAP4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU): How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud" ( [E] or [7] ) . The size of the Solar System Some figures may help to give a better picture of the sizes involved here. The Heliosphere has a radius of about 100 AU, where 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

The 8 planets (now that Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet) consist of the 4 inner "rocky planets", with Mercury and Venus closest to the Sun, then Earth, and then Mars. The 4 outer "gas giants" are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and finally Neptune, about 30 AU out from the Sun.

Between Neptune and the boundary of the Heliosphere is a region called the Kuiper Belt, which contains a number of dwarf planets and asteroids. The true planets orbit fairly close to the Sun's equatorial plane (the "ecliptic"), but Kuiper Belt objects (which include some short-period or repeating comets) have orbits inclined to this plane, and the inclinations tend to be greater, the further from the Sun.

With improving telescopes and observational techniques, more and more smaller objects ("dwarf planets") are being recognized as existing within the nearer Oort Cloud, many of which never penetrate into actual Solar System space. Figure F5 following shows the orbits of about 13 of these TNOs ("Trans-Neptunian Objects" -- the 4-digit number in a label denotes the year of discovery).

Figure MI504-F5. Trans-Neptunian Objects. From [4].

In the figure, the tiny blue circle at the centre is the orbit of Neptune, so many of the orbits take these TNOs far, far out into the Oort Cloud proper. Even so, these TNOs have only been found because on part of their orbit, they come close enough to the Heliosphere to be accessible to modern instruments. They also need to be above a certain size, to reflect enough light to be detectable. As of 2019, more than 2600 of these TNOs have been identified [8].

So a true OCO (Oort Cloud Object), following a path which never takes it closer than, say, 150 AU from the Sun, is most unlikely to be found with current techniques. Even a relatively large object like Sedna, with a diameter of almost 1000 km, would not have been detected if its orbit around the Sun was more circular.

Looking for Planet Nine -- and beyond Looking again at Figure F5, it can be seen that that most of the orbits shown are not randomly placed, but are preferentially over to the left. Researchers analyzing these orbits have come to the conclusion that the pattern shown is due to the presence of another large planet, as yet identified, which is being called Planet Nine.

Planet Nine is thought to be 10 times the mass of the Earth, almost as large as the outer gas giants Uranus and Neptune. It will be difficult to locate with optical telescopes, if it exists, just because it is so distant -- it would be less than one-thousandth as bright as it would if it was at the distance of Pluto.

Figure MI504-F6. The view from Planet Nine. From [4].

Figure F6 gives an artist's impression of what it would look like from behind Planet Nine, looking towards the Milky Way. The little bright ellipse on the top right represents the entire Solar System. There is more on Planet Nine at "XT811: Planet Nine, Doorkeeper to the Oort Worlds" ( [F] or [4] ) .

The Oort Cloud has no outer boundary, it is really just our part of all the matter in interstellar space, the "Oort Soup". But if we imagined it as sphere extending almost halfway to the nearest star, about 4 light-years away, it would have a radius of 100,000 AU, so the Solar System would have only one-billionth of the volume of the Oort Cloud.

Viewing the position from the inside out, it is clear that our Oort Cloud has plenty of space to contain a profusion of bodies right up sub-star size, possibly whole sub-solar systems, with their own planets orbiting big central bodies not quite massive enough to achieve ignition and shine by their own light.

Looking from the outside in There is another approach to identifying what the Oort Cloud might contain, by looking at known data about the masses and frequency of occurrence of stars.

Figure MI504-F7. Star sizes and distribution. From [3].

Figure F7 gives a representation of this topic. The very largest stars known, called blue giants, have masses up to about 150 times that of the Sun. There are relatively few of these.

Looking at stars with lower masses, these become more numerous, the lower their mass. The smallest stars, called red dwarfs, are very numerous, making up 70% of all the stars in the Galaxy [3]. Objects smaller than red dwarfs do not have enough mass to sustain the fusion reactions which power stars, and so cannot be detected by the light they give out.

How many objects smaller than red dwarfs would we expect to encounter, in a given area of the Universe? Older ideas on how planet formation have often assumed that they formed at the same time as a "parent" star, but newer work suggests that bodies form by aggregation of matter throughout space, and it is only when one of these aggregation reaches star mass that we can detect it.

In other words, the view is that planetary aggregation happens first, and that stars are the result of continued aggregation of planetary material -- when the mass of an aggregation is big enough, "ignition" occurs, and the new star can be detected by the light it gives off. Meanwhile, all the aggregations which are not star size ("Oort Soup") continue in space, with chaotic movement according to their past history.

With the normal trend to have greater number of objects of smaller categories, as with red dwarfs, we would expect interstellar space to be full of objects smaller than stars, which together would exactly fill the role of Dark Matter -- unseen in the visible spectrum, but exerting normal gravitational effects according to their mass. There is more on the formation of stars and solar systems in interstellar space in "UGAP1: The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation and the nature of Dark Matter" ( [G] or [5] ) .

Figure F8 shows the influence of Dark Matter within our home galaxy (the Milky Way), which has a radius of something over 50,000 light-years, The upper line shows how the movement of stars within our galaxy falls away with distance from the centre. The lower line shows these motions would be expected if the motions were due only to the gravity exerted by the masses of the relevant visible stars. The difference between the lines represents the influence if dark matter, that is, of objects or material which are exerting gravitational influence buy are not visible from Earth.

Figure MI504-F8. Influence of Dark Matter in the Milky Way galaxy. From [10].

From the above we have seen that much of this Dark Matter may be merely Oort Soup bodies, that is, objects in space which are not massive enough to operate as stars, not hot enough to give out radiation in the visible spectrum.

Vortex Stars in our galaxy When it comes to AGNs or supermassive black holes, we have only the one, at the centre of our galaxy, but its axes of rotation point up and down, perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, and so its axial beams cannot be seen.

Smaller Vortex Stars, such as White Dwarfs or Neutron Stars, do exist within our galaxy, and a high proportion of these will have their axial beams not pointed towards Earth, and so they will not be visible, and will count as Dark Matter.

We have seen that the Oort Soup is a prime candidate for Dark Matter, and is the source of the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) which permeates our galaxy. This is explained in a related article, "MI503: Miscon Three: The idea that CMBR came from the Big Bang is a Giant Misconception" ( [H] or [9] ) .

This means that CMBR data can be used to analyze the nature of Dark Matter in our vicinity. For us on Earth, most of the CMBR comes from the closer regions of our Oort Cloud. Most of it is from cold bodies existing at less than about 3 K, three degrees above Absolute Zero. CMBR as a source of information about Oort Soup objects is a rich field of enquiry which has hitherto been almost completely neglected.

It's worth noting that there must also be larger objects, the Oort Worlds, which are warmer than 3 K because they generate their own internal heat. In our Solar System, the more massive the planet, the warmer is its active core. Jupiter, our largest planet, actually generates slightly more heat internally than it receives from the Sun.

The article on Planet Nine ( [F] or [4] ) points out the possibility of "Subsolar Systems", systems of planets and other objects orbiting a massive central object, not quite large enough to become a star. These stars are sometimes called Brown Dwarfs, substellar objects that occupy the mass range between the heaviest gas giant planets and the lightest stars, with approximately 13 to 75 Jupiter masses.

Brown Dwarfs are only one step smaller than Red Dwarfs. They do not emit light in the visible spectrum, but do shine in the next wavelength down, the infrared. It is in the extensive infrared bands, between the visible and the microwave bands, that the opportunity to greatly enlarge our knowledge of the Oort Soup lies.

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AOI articles with relevant evidence
[A]. UG102: Understanding Vortex Stars: White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, and AGNs.
[B]. BS809: Graphic Representations of Black Holes and other Vortex Stars, and some Bold Propositions on the Universe.
[C]. SL101: What is Dark Matter?.
[D]. UG105: Obvious: The Solution to the Dark Matter puzzle.
[E]. UGAP4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU): How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud.
[F]. XT811: Planet Nine, Doorkeeper to the Oort Worlds.
[G]. UGAP1: The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation and the nature of Dark Matter.
[H]. MI503: Miscon Three: The idea that CMBR came from the Big Bang is a Giant Misconception.

References and Links [1]. Dark matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter .
[2]. Martin Ratcliffe. State of the Universe 2007. Springer, 2007.
[3]. Charles Q Choi. Red Dwarf Stars might be the best places to discover alien life. https://www.astrobio.net/alien-life/red-dwarf-stars-might-best-places-discover-alien-life/ .
[4]. David Noel. XT811 - Planet Nine, Doorkeeper to the Oort Worlds. www.aoi.com.au/XT/XT811/ .
[5]. David Noel. UGAP1: The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation and the nature of Dark Matte. www.aoi.com.au/UG/UGAP1/ .
[6]. David Noel. UGAP3: Living In The Universe: What CMBR tells us about Dark Matter, and much more. www.aoi.com.au/UG/UGAP3/ .
[7]. David Noel. UGAP4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU): How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud. www.aoi.com.au/UG/UGAP4/ .
[8]. List of trans-Neptunian objects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trans-Neptunian_objects .
[9]. David Noel. MI503: Miscon Three: The idea that CMBR came from the Big Bang is a Giant Misconception www.aoi.com.au/MI/MI503/ .
[10]. Does dark matter affect our solar system? https://www.astronomy.com/science/does-dark-matter-affect-our-solar-system/ . [11]. What indications are there of dark matter within our own galaxy? Google AI. 2025 August 29.

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Version 1.0 compilation started 2019 Aug 13, first version on Web 2019 Aug 18.
V. 2.0, with quasar sources and adjust for * as /MI/MI504/, 2025 Aug 29.