Here's a second article on this ...Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the universe evolved—the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
These satellite galaxies exhibit a bizarre alignment—they seem to lie on an enormous thin rotating plane—called the "plane of satellites."
This seemingly unlikely arrangement had puzzled astronomers for over 50 years, leading many to question the validity of the standard cosmological model that seeks to explain how the universe came to look as it does today.
Now, new research jointly led by the Universities of Durham, U.K., and Helsinki, Finland, has found that the plane of satellites is a cosmological quirk which will dissolve over time in the same way that star constellations also change.
… snip …
The Milky Way's satellites seem to be arranged in an implausibly thin plane piercing through the galaxy and, oddly, they are also circling in a coherent and long-lived disk.
There is no known physical mechanism that would make satellites planes. Instead, it was thought that satellite galaxies should be arranged in a roughly round configuration tracing the dark matter.
https://www.space.com/milky-way-dwarf-g ... ark-matter
So … when an observation doesn’t fit the DM model … just dismiss it as a coincidence … a “quirk”? Do any of us here believe they can do a simulation (that excludes electric current and electromagnetism) and predict where these satellite galaxies are going to be in a BILLION years? We're just supposed to believe it’s just a coincidence that we happen to be alive during the <14% of the time that the satellite galaxies in our galaxy will supposedly assume this very strange configuration?"If you look at the velocities of the satellite galaxies today, they are moving along the plane, but what we did that's really new and exciting is forecast where their orbits are taking them in a billion years time," Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at the University of Durham in the U.K. and a member of Sawalha's team, told Space.com. "They just happen to be in the plane today, that's the coincidence of the whole thing, and in a billion years or less they will leave the plane."
And is it just coincidence that 21 of the 28 dwarf galaxies share a coherent motion? A January 2021 paper (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A ... M/abstract) said that only 0.2% of simulations they performed resulted in flattened and coherently moving structures. They said the rest of the analogs only arise from chance projection. And therefore they concluded that “the observed co-rotating planes of satellite are a persistent challenge to ΛCDM”. Hmmmmm … don’t think this is *settled science*.
Indeed, as the space.com article notes,
The article goes on to point out thatMarcel Pawlowski, an astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Germany who did not take part in the research, is skeptical about the coincidence of a chance alignment. "Why would we be here at this special time right now when the satellite galaxies have this distribution?" he told Space.com. "There's no real reason for that."
So all of those alignments must be chance occurrences at this one moment in time, too? Call me skeptical. The second article also notes there are uncertainties in the data the scientists are using … uncertainties that Pawlowski at least believes could lead to a simulation concluding the alignment is a momentary coincidence. Chaos in simulations will do strange things.The existence of the plane of satellites is also an important prediction of Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, which is a rival to the theory of dark matter. Astronomers came up with dark matter to explain galaxies that stay together even though their gravity appears too low to maintain them. MOND says instead that dark matter does not exist, and what we see as extra gravity is caused by a tweak to Newtonian gravity at low accelerations, such as those of stars orbiting galaxies or satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
According to MOND, "the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy should have had a past encounter about 8 billion years ago," Pawlowski said. In this scenario, the gravity of the Andromeda galaxy should have ripped material from the Milky Way, creating what astronomers call a tidal tail, like we see in the interactions of other galaxies. The gas and stars in this tidal tail could have coalesced into a bunch of dwarf galaxies lined up with the trajectory of the Milky Way coming from its encounter with the Andromeda galaxy, MOND argues. If true, the same process should have formed a plane of satellite galaxies around the Andromeda galaxy as well as the Milky Way's.
It turns out that the Andromeda galaxy does have a plane of satellites, as do several other nearby galaxies, including Centaurus A, which is still reeling from a galaxy interaction and merger that it experienced about 2 billion years ago.
And isn’t it funny that DM advocates published a paper in 2016 (https://www.cambridge.org/core/services ... nt-div.pdf) that said “Our results show that the presence of a thin, extended, rotating plane of satellites is not a challenge for the Cold Dark Matter paradigm, but actually supports one of the predictions of this paradigm related to the presence of filaments of dark matter around galaxies at high redshift.” So if the astronomers simulating galaxy motions a billion years into the future are right, their *evidence* for DM just got thinner. Guess you win, lose some.
