Is there any mathematical support for the black matter theory?

Question

Is there any mathematical support for the black matter theory?

Answer 1

Ummmm...you mean Dark Matter?

Sure, there's a a little math about it, but no more than for say....gravity.

Answer 2

Astronomer Vera Rubin's discovery of the "flat rotation curves" of outer stars of spiral galaxies is the most direct evidence of dark matter. No mathematical proof as yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/bre...

Answer 3

You mean dark matter?

Observations of galaxies show that the amount of mass we can see is not sufficient to describe the rotating motion of the galaxies.  So there must be something we don't see.  And you can figure out it's distributed in a sphere around the galaxy--which makes sense if this something doesn't interact much with anything except through gravity.

Now what exactly this something is is anybody's guess.

Answer 4

yes

Answer 5

Yes, plenty.  You can look up dark matter on arXiv.org for papers.  And here's observational support.  http://discovermagazine.com/2006/nov/dar...

Answer 6

Mathematical support for dark matter is the only kind of support there is.  When scientists tried to calculate the motion of all the normal matter, the calculations didn't work out.  So Zwicky postulated the existence of matter which didn't interact with light but still had gravitational mass.  They made guesses and kept adding dark mass to the universe until the equations of motion matched observations.