Unbalanced star clusters may disprove Newton's laws of gravity
Astronomers observing star clusters in our galaxy have found evidence that controversially defies Newton's laws of gravity and could upend our understanding of the universe.
According to Live Science, this puzzling discovery supports a controversial idea that completely eliminates dark matter. Scientists arrived at this evidence by observing open star clusters, that is, tightly bound groups of up to a few hundred stars within larger galaxies.
Open star clusters have trails of stars, known as tidal tails, in front and behind them.
Scientists' observations indicate that the front tail in these star clusters always contains a much larger number of stars close to the cluster than the back tail.
This casts doubt on Newton's law of universal gravitation, which suggests that there must be the same number of stars in both the fore and aft tidal tails.
Open star clusters have trails of stars, known as tidal tails, in front and behind them.
"It's very important," astrophysicist Pavel Krupa, from the University of Bonn, told Live Science.
Krupa added that this uneven distribution of stars is notable, but not severe enough to involve any kind of dark matter - an invisible substance believed to exert a strong gravitational force on visible matter in the universe.
He continued, “This is basically a game changer. This destroys all the work done on galaxies and cosmology that posits dark matter and Newtonian gravity.”
Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation, published in 1687, states that every particle in the universe gravitates toward other bodies with a force proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), also known as Milgrom dynamics, after astrophysicist Mordhai Milgrom, who developed it in the early 1980s, argues that normal Newtonian dynamics does not apply to very large scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies — although most physicists do. The astrologers think they do.
But Krupa said that at the time of both Newton and Einstein, astronomers did not know that galaxies existed, so Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) was developed, to update it with the new observations.
Albert Einstein later incorporated this law into his theory of general relativity, which was published in 1915. He continued: “The majority of scientists reject the completely modified Newtonian dynamics theory.
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