Do you want slightly darker matter? Cause that's how you get slightly darker matter!

"Repeat until you think it’s correct. Hopefully other people agree with you."

Dark Energy has entered the chat.

For those with time to spare: study all you can about neutron stars (including magnetars and quark stars), then go back to "black holes" (especially their event horizons and beyond) and there's a good chance you'll feel like a lot of aspects in BH theories are mythologies written in math - all of it entertaining, nonetheless.

For those who seek extra credit, study zero-point energy before reflecting on cosmic voids, galaxy filaments, galaxies, gravitationally bound celestial systems, quantum chromodynamics and neutrinos. Then, ponder the relativity between neutron stars, zero-point energy and hadron quark sea.

The attempts to measure dark matter directly have gotten incredibly sensitive and still haven't found anything.

My personal dark matter theory is that 80% of all stars are surrounded by Dyson Spheres.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It's been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.

On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there's a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the

On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar -- though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory -- to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.

With the big problem being that it doesn't work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn't. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.

Dark matter theories -- that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don't understand at all -- still are the best explanation. That means we're closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there's a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.

There's no scandal. Some people who are leading proponents of MOND theory recently published a new paper using what might be the best scenario we currently have to detect MOND (wide binary stars), and their more precise calculations...are not consistent with MOND. They published evidence against the very theory they were betting on.

https://youtu.be/HlNSvrYygRc?si=otqhH6VINIsCMfiS

The observations of systems like the Bullet Cluster imply that dark matter is actual material -- baryonic matter. Stuff that exists in specific locations and has mass. Modifying the math of the physical laws does not explain these observations without absolutely going into contortions where dark matter explains them quite elegantly.

Its observed gravitational effects is evidence. Otherwise nobody would have given it a name.