Quote:
Originally Posted by Arituay
If that were true could the gravity effects we observe from at least a portion of dark matter really be from matter in another brane or in the bulk, meaning we will never truly be able to determine exactly what it is, just that it is reacting gravitationally to create the scaffolding of our galaxies?
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I also can't link you to papers, and frankly I'm not sure whether that would even help-- string theory is too difficult to sound like anything but wildly unconstrained speculation to anyone but an expert (and to many of them too). But I think what you are really asking is, is it possible that dark matter, whatever its explanation, might only interact with the known universe gravitationally, and in no other way? To that I would say, anything's possible. But note that if this is the case, it's a pretty major crisis for astronomy-- there's only so much you can do by mapping its gravitational influence, and after that it would never get past hypothetical possibilities. We'd like an independent way to explore the properties of that stuff, such as a laboratory detection, or some type of astrophysical observation that would be directly attributed to its decay into things we can detect.