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Comment and Space

We may have to rewrite our understanding of gravity

There is a mismatch between two ways of measuring galactic mass. Dark matter is one way to solve it, but so is rewriting the laws of gravity, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

3 March 2021

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully; ack

I’VE been giving a lot of talks about my research to a range of scientific audiences of late. The listeners range from groups that are mainly undergraduates to those made up of specialists in my field – in other words, people who are also searching for and trying to understand the behaviour of dark matter.

In nearly all of these presentations, I start by explaining Vera Rubin and Kent Ford’s observations of galaxies. These showed that there was a mismatch between their measurements of galactic masses and what one might expect the mass to be based on how many stars…

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