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mystified5016last Wednesday at 4:41 PM0 repliesview on HN

Probably not. It requires a lot of mass to make galaxies make sense. And we can compute that the extra matter is usually distributed in a halo around the outer edge of the galaxy. The density is such that if it were any kind of normal matter, we should be able to see it in at least one galaxy.

All of our observation tells us that whatever dark matter is, it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic field. That is, it does not interact with light of any frequency, so is completely undetectable to us. As far as we can tell, dark matter appears to not interact with anything other than gravity, which is pretty weird. We think that it doesn't even interact with itself; two dark matter particles should just pass through each other.

We know a lot about what dark matter isn't, but we're still pretty clueless on what it is