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THE CONVENTIONAL THEORY OF DARK MATTER just got some potent support from a new batch of observations to be reported by scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) this week at a meeting in the Canary Islands. One of the main reasons for believing in the existence of non-luminous matter is that the motions of galaxies within galaxy clusters and the motions of matter around individual galaxies seems to defy conventional celestial mechanics. Either plenty of extra (but unconventional) mass must lurk in the vicinity of the galaxies (the dark matter theory) or the known laws of physics might be in need of amendment (the theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND). Scrutinizing a subset of 3000 galaxies (from Sloan's inventory of 250,000 galaxies) with satellite galaxies in tow, the researchers' profile of satellite velocities supported the dark matter theory and discounted the MOND idea. (See the Sloan website at www.sdss.org )
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