DARK MATTER IDENTIFIED?

Here is some exciting news for those interested in the increasingly relevant and empirically supported idea that stellar-mass black holes comprise the dark matter that has confused theoretical physicists and eluded experimental physicists for over 50 years.

A research team has just discovered that a globular cluster of stars contains on the order of 100 stellar-mass black holes instead of the expected few (Pueten et al, Mon. Not. Royal Astr. Soc., 2016).

Every galaxy in the cosmos has roughly between 10 and 1,000 globular clusters associated with it.

If a significant fraction of those GCs has roughly 10–100 black holes, then that is a truly enormous number of previously undiscovered black holes, and would account for enough mass to make up the entire dark matter, especially when combined with the stellar-mass black hole populations already discovered by the MACHO and LIGO research groups.

Maybe we now know what the dark matter is. The fact that this was predicted in 1987 should be noted (Oldershaw, R.L., Astrophysical Journal, 322, 34–36, 1987).

Robert L. Oldershaw

http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity; Fractal Cosmology