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Originally Posted by Cougar
I thought the baryonic molecular hydrogen gas clouds (which you propose as a replacement for the cold dark matter) were pretty well accounted for in our galaxy. Yet, as Rocky Kolb puts it, "We find that the galaxy has a much larger mass than the sum of all the stars, dust, and other things we "see." The shortfall is not just a few percentage points, but most of the mass of our galaxy seems to have been left unaccounted."
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This thread is where I posted some links to papers that discuss the possibility that the Milky Way's dark matter could be entirely baryonic in the form of molecular hydrogen clouds. The key paper that proposed the idea are by Pfenniger et al. I pointed out some of their arguments and a few papers that find evidence for large amounts of baryonic dark matter. If Pfenniger is right, then Rocky Kolb is wrong.
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I'm no expert in this field, but I expect the molecular hydrogen is one of those "other things" that is easily detectable. So what's flattening our galaxy's rotation curve?
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Actually molecular hydrogen is not easily detectable and that is the problem. If it were easily detected the matter (Pun not intended
) would already be resolved. Atomic hydrogen is easily detected. Molecular hydrogen clouds could potentially exist in amounts that are capable of explaining the flattening of the galaxy's rotation curve.
I point to this as a possibility. The initial response to this is that it must be wrong because the Big Bang forbids it (nucleosynthesis predictions and so on). But the reality is that the baryonic dark matter content of the universe has not been observationally determined. As such it is an important test for the Big Bang. IF it is determined that the baryonic dark matter exists in the large amounts hinted at by some studies such as those I linked to on the other thread, then the Big Bang's current version will fail that test.