Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Friday 17 November 2017

Lecture 4/4 : All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here

Lecture 4/4 : All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here

And so at last my first foray in lecturing draws to a close. This time I look at problems in galaxy evolution and how they might be solved. The missing satellite problem is just one aspect in the much greater missing galaxy problem. After nearly 20 years, simulations are finally getting the number of predicted galaxies to match the observations... but they're so complicated, this doesn't necessarily mean they've got the answer right. Planes of satellite galaxies, whilst generating papers with hundreds of citations, I show are just pure nonsense and absolutely nothing to worry about, but if they're real then they're not the dark matter killer they're claimed to be. Ultra diffuse galaxies, dark galaxies, the Tully-Fisher relation, the mass discrepancy acceleration relation, and a showdown between MOND and CDM : it's all in here.

Regular blog rants about Jeremy Corbyn and Plato can now resume unhindered. I know y'all dying for that. :P

Though I'll probably be extracting parts of this to make shorter, more outreachy posts for those who don't want to wade through everything here.

This post is a placeholder. I will add a better summary here in due course.
at
Labels: ,

2 comments:

  1. Dan Weese17 November 2017 at 14:33

    I figure, over this little course of lectures, about 3/4 of what I thought I knew about this subject was either wrong or too simplistic.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhys Taylor17 November 2017 at 15:57

    Then my secret agenda has been achieved ! :)

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Back from the grave ?

I'd thought that the controversy over NGC 1052-DF2 and DF4 was at least partly settled by now, but this paper would have you believe ot...

  • Death of the Flying Snakes
    In the last batch of simulations, we dropped a long gas stream into the gravitational potential of a cluster to see if it would get torn...
  • The Return of the Failures
    Another day, another paper on how exciting Ultra Diffuse Galaxies are.  At first, these large, faint galaxies were just wholly unexpected, a...
  • Proving a negative is perfectly possible
    Of course you can prove a negative. In one sense this can be the easiest thing in the world : your theory predicts something which doesn...