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xenadu02last Wednesday at 9:23 PM0 repliesview on HN

No. There's too much of it for that.

If this missing mass were in the form of dust the entire night sky (relatively speaking) should be full of dust reflecting light and radiating infrared due to being lit by starlight for billions of years. But we don't.

If the missing mass were in rogue planets, brown dwarfs, or even cold dwarf stars there would need to be so very many of them that we should be detecting them by the millions with our current telescopes as they pass between us and distant stars. But we don't.

The better our telescopes get the more and more certain we are that the missing mass is not normal matter as we know it. We are getting really good at spotting dim objects (or their side-effects) even when hidden by the glare of stars. Normal matter but not radiating much energy just can't hide from us well enough to account for the missing mass.