> The vast majority of matter in the universe is darkāit is entirely invisible and detected only through its gravitational effects
They state like dark matter is a fact. Isn't it a hypothesis?
> The FRBs shine through the fog of the intergalactic medium, and by precisely measuring how the light slows down, we can weigh that fog, even when it's too faint to see
Light is always light and has always the same speed but its path in a gas is less straightforward than in a vacuum because of the interactions with atoms. It takes longer to get through. Its speed as we can measure it is c divided by the refractive index of the gas, if I'm not wrong.
1. It is a phenomenon not a hypothesis. Dark matter is a collection of observational facts that indicate an unknown source of gravity.
2. Yes, in any medium lights slows down. This is what refractive index measures.
This has nothing to do with dark matter, it's about the missing baryonic matter. And this result just confirms what most people thought anyway, but it's still rather important because it's a very solid result so we don't need to call it "missing matter" anymore.
This study accounts for missing ordinary matter, not dark matter. The linked article makes this clear in the first paragraph. Sometimes I wonder if the first commenters (and often top commenters) on HN read the article at all or just respond based on the headline, because these comments often seem barely related to the actual article content.
someothherguyy|8 months ago
throwaway290|8 months ago
They state like dark matter is a fact. Isn't it a hypothesis?
> The FRBs shine through the fog of the intergalactic medium, and by precisely measuring how the light slows down, we can weigh that fog, even when it's too faint to see
Light slows down??
pmontra|8 months ago
Same thing for light in a liquid or in a solid. Example: speeds of radio waves in networking cables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_veloci...
nxpnsv|8 months ago
ChrisArchitect|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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wewewedxfgdf|8 months ago
ahofmann|8 months ago
senectus1|8 months ago
philipov|8 months ago
jbotz|8 months ago
om2|8 months ago
nxpnsv|8 months ago
verisimi|8 months ago