My blog's name doesn't exist....

Howdy there scinece fans. I know that many and most of you are not in fact big fans of science, but I found somthing that i thought was very intersting. A paper was recently published in, you guessed it, a peer reviewed journal about the existance of dark matter. Now, as a brief introduction, if you have ever wandered down the halls of your University's Astronomy dept. then you probably saw a poster with a pie chart on it telling you what the universe was made out of. It would tell you that ordinary matter makes up ~10% of the universe. that 25% was 'dark matter' and that the rest is 'dark energy'. "Dark Matter" was concieved to explain why galaxies (like our own Milky way) behave the way that they do. The idea was you look at the stars and estimate how much matter there is, and run some calculations and they come back wrong. But, if you throw in some 'dark matter' that you actually can't see or detect in any way, then you get the answer you expect. This has been widely accepted for some time now. Dark Energy, while sounding like something that Darth Vader uses, is actually contrived to explain why the universe appears to be expanding. (and its a totally different topic). anyway, the title is a link to a recently published paper where some clever grad student thought to run through the calulations using General Relativaty (GR) math instead of Classical Newtonian (CN) math. GR is a very sucessful theory which describes things that newtonian math can't. (for example, GR explains why the orbit of Mercury behaves the way it does. CN physics doesn't quite predict the orbit of Mercury properly unless you invent an even closer planet that is somehow hidden by the sun ( someone did so and named the planet 'Vulcan'. (no joke)). But we are pretty sure that there is no Vulcan. Anyway, the whole point of this, is that this dude used GR to calculate the orbits of some galaxys and his answers were right on without having to invoke "Dark Matter". I think this is freakin awesome if it turns out to be true. It more appealing because it describes what we see with without having to invent some matter that we can't see and have never measured. Anyway, I know that you all stopped reading about 20 lines back, but if you want the paper Here it is.