text: how to be stupid enough to believe in dark matter? http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e397/bigpappadiaz/darkgalaxy.jpg  in the picture above, something not seen in the inscribed circle has astronomers excited. at an estimated 50 million light-years from earth, they found a large mass of hydrogen a hundred million times the mass of the sun-a galaxy of sorts, but containing no stars.   the challenge they faced began with the fact that the cloud is rotating way too fast, in apparent defiance of gravity. without some other force acting on the cloud it should fly apart. the astronomers assumed this force must be gravity. as reported in the bbc story on the discovery, "there must be a stronger gravitational force acting than can be accounted for using visible matter." but this is the same problem posed by galaxies: they rotate too fast for gravity to hold them together. due to the similarities in rotational dynamics, the investigators of virgohi21 concluded that the remote cloud is a starless "galaxy," the way science progresses is by postulating possible options, it doesn't mean that any one of them is the answer, only that it is a possible answer. from all the possible answers peer review will pick the most likely explanation and accept it temporarily in a 'conditional' mode until it can be demonstrated that in fact this is the correct answer. otherwise it gets thrown out.   everything is accepted as a possible answer, not as the answer.