this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
1 points (100.0% liked)
Astronomy
7105 readers
4 users here now
A community for sharing astronomy-related news, content, research, photographs, etc.
When sharing photographs and articles, please make an effort to include source URLs.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It can't be a direct observation, as "dark matter" is simply a made-up term to describe something we only have a partial understanding of. A direct observation might be particles, waves, matter, and things which exist within the framework of known science and laws of nature.
Yes, I'm only a layperson, but I think science is pretty clear about that kind of thing.
EDIT: And yes, WP is of course written by volunteers, but it's also sourced from actual science papers. If you're trying to rebut something in a WP article, the way to do so would be going to the paper(s) in question and building a counterargument there.
Of course it is not a direct observation, if it were it would be called something else and the conversations would never had started.
Dark matter is more like a list of problems, observations that don't correspond with our understanding of the universe. It is dark because we can't anything causing them, and matter because it seems to be way too little mass for the gravitation effects we see.