Time for a new gnome!

Plasma and electricity in space. Failure of gravity-only cosmology. Exposing the myths of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, neutron stars, and other mathematical constructs. The electric model of stars. Predictions and confirmations of the electric comet.
BeAChooser
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Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 2:24 am

Time for a new gnome!

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sun Feb 13, 2022 5:40 am

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01 ... ar-flares/
Dark matter asteroids (if they exist) may cause solar flares 
I guess the gnomists figure that if they can stir up fear of this possibility, the rubes will keep sending them $$$$$ to search for DM.
Dark matter interacts so weakly with ordinary matter that we simply don’t notice it over the racket of ordinary matter drunkenly shouting at the Universe’s particle bar. What we need is to give it a place to shine—to let it take the spotlight and sing karaoke. It turns out that the inside of a star might just be that place (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/1 ... 128.021101 ).

… snip …

If it's true that dark matter can form structures, there are probably asteroids of dark matter flying around the Universe. Occasionally, dark matter asteroids will collide with stars, and then things get very exciting.

Based on what we know about the Universe and how galaxies form, dark matter asteroids have to be moving very fast.
That sounds suspiciously like a gnome to support this new gnome.
"Fast," in this case, means "faster than the speed of sound within a star." So when an asteroid hits a star, it produces a cylindrically shaped acoustic shock wave. The star acts as an acoustic lens—a star is less dense and bends acoustic rays toward the surface—so the shock wave is loosely focused around the entry point of the asteroid.

This process acts to intensify the shock wave in a local region rather than letting it spread out. Then, as the shock wave gets closer to the surface, its speed (relative to the speed of sound) gets higher, making its effect on the stellar medium greater.

These two processes are sufficient to cause the star to emit a burst of X-rays, with a tail of emission extending into visible light. In other words, there is a burst of light that is definitely visible to our observational tools.
Presumably they’ve done calculations to prove this.
The researchers used the estimated dark matter density of a globular cluster called 47 Tuc to calculate how often flares induced by dark asteroids would be visible to the Hubble Space Telescope (if it had the right filters in place). The scientists concluded that a week of observation time should be sufficient to detect flares. They then looked back at Hubble’s database and found that 47 Tuc had been the subject of a week-long observation—but with the wrong filter in place. Unsurprisingly, it didn't find anything.
Oh yeah … the wrong filters. I hear the sound of k’ching, k’ching, folks.

Fortunately, it sounds like we’ll be spared the cost of refitting Hubble with the “right” filters …
In addition to Hubble, the researchers also considered a soon-to-be deployed wide-field UV space telescope. In this case, the researchers propose looking at K-dwarfs (a set of relatively cold stars in the main sequence) that are local by astronomy standards. Indeed, if dark matter asteroids do exist and behave as the researchers predict, this telescope cannot avoid detecting the resulting flares. The same would be true for any others that are also designed to survey wide sections of the sky in the ultraviolet.

Even our own Sun would be subject to flares caused by dark asteroids. The researchers estimate that the Sun should collide with a small asteroid every year. The evidence—solar flares—may even already be in the observational record.
Hope springs eternal. But DM gnomists must always have an out …
There is a problem, however. The effect of a dark matter asteroid is very close to that of a standard solar flare. Observations of our own Sun indicate that most flares are associated with sunspots and are caused by the release of magnetic energy. They are often associated with the ejection of charged particles (a coronal mass ejection).

The key words there are most and often. It's not like we can point to a flare that is not associated with a sunspot and link it directly to dark matter. Indeed, the difference between asteroid collisions and standard flares only appears to be in how the emission spectrum cools from X-ray to the ultraviolet and on to the visible and infrared.

So a simple sky survey is not enough. Instead, as soon as a flare is detected, other instruments need to be turned to point at the source to examine the flare for a longer period of time and over a broad range of the observational spectrum. Only then might we be able to distinguish a dark asteroid flare from a normal solar flare.
I’m starting to hear k’ching k’ching again.
This is a bit of a downer because most existing sky surveys are full of bright flashes, and there are already programs dedicated to finding them in near-real-time and pointing telescopes at them as soon as they occur. I find it difficult to believe that we do not have a catalog of unexplained flares that can already be analyzed.
#Me Too
So where are the dark matter asteroids?

The bigger problem with the search for dark matter is the underlying assumption that it must interact with normal matter non-gravitationally. Not only do we lack good evidence that this is the case, but we now have a lot of evidence that it isn't so.

Although I support this search, it shows evidence of our own biases. Gravitational evidence on multiple scales and in various situations is not enough. In a sense, we have to see the stuff before we can say that dark matter truly exists.
Ah … a bit of rationality finally creeps in. But I'm afraid that horse left the barn 50 years ago when the mainstream started telling us that DM truly, 100%, absolutely, unquestionably, without a doubt, exists ... in order to keep the money flowing. And boy has it flowed.

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