Headline is waaaay too overstated. A computer simulation model showed that an arrangement of dark matter as described would create an output that matches some of the things we observe in reality. But that's SUPER far from scientists declaring that this is how the galaxy actually is.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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i know. they all do it more/less. that article has a few links. also have another board with lower standards. mostly just me for picture articles; https://midwest.social/c/science . my eyes are getting bad for reading/typing. 62
It's so overstated, the existence of dark matter hasn't even been proven yet.
I thought the existence of something out there was pretty well understood. We just didn't know exactly what it is and so it's called "dark matter"
Dark matter is like x and y in a quadratic equation in maths. We don't know what it is but we know it is there. It effecting the equation such that you are getting a result.
We know there is something, it is effecting the gravity around it to result the apparent motion of the stuff around it. But we don't know what it is or how it is working.
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I feel better knowing this guy is looking over our galaxy
Great dark buffalo
Sounds like a Native American spirit animal.
Looks like a bat
All I see are boobs.
The fact that 95% of the universe's mass-energy content is fucking invisible kinda freaks me out.
I like to imagine there's a group of dark matter physicists out there trying to explain why their models of the universe are 5% off, and coming up with the notion of photons and the theory of photo-energetic matter. We're the oddballs in this neighborhood.
It’s a freaky thing to consider if you believe in some divine nature like the soul, or if you believe that you’re a conscious agent independent of your environment. With these beliefs, you position yourself as an “observer” of the universe… such a position costs you observability of the contextual processes which led to your being.
What if, instead, you’re a giant mount of cells that evolved to interact with your environment? What if your self is more of a relationship with nature than it is a static identity? From this angle, we should expect that we’re fighting an uphill battle when we want to learn about the nature of being in this universe. Most likely, we can not perceive of things which we had no necessity to perceive at any point in our ancestral lineage.
Dark matter is spooky, but only because we are beings of spookiness. We decide what is spooky and project that experience into the empirical reality of our dwelling.
It's a stand-in for the lack of a better understanding currently. No one has detected dark matter in our solar system yet. It's all just deviations from how huge amounts of matter should behave according to our formulas. Yes, Dark Matter is well established; because it's convenient. But assuming some invisible existence to explain a lack of understanding is not science, that's a religion.
It's a hole in the theories. The universe is fine.
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I am but a ceramic bead in the intergalactic weighted blanket floating through the cosmos.
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Various projections of the posterior mean density of the constrained simulation ensemble, normalized by the cosmic mean density. Credit: Nature Astronomy (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02770-w. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02770-w
You leave my mom out of this, and where did you get photos of her posterior?
she sat on the copier. milkyway has a supermassive black hole. 🤣 🤣
our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is moving toward us at a speed of about 100 kilometers per second.
Uhhhhhh
Yeah that's not even fast given the distances involved. About 450 million years away if I'm not screwing up the numbers.
It's coming right at us!