<story><title>Heavy particles don’t explain gravitational lensing oddities</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/gravitational-lensing-may-point-to-lighter-dark-matter-candidate/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jvanderbot</author><text>Sticking to TFA, and not ancillary information, I found this frustrating:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Instead, the research team ran 75 different models with the initial conditions chosen at random. By chance, some of these created distortions similar to the ones seen in the real-world data, typically affecting only one of the four lensed images. So, the researchers conclude that the distortions in the lensed images are consistent with a dark matter halo structured by the quantum interference of axions.&lt;p&gt;Essentially the best contender aside from WIMPs is, as subject of TFA, axions. And axions have near-random interference and standing waves, which essentially scatters about light bent by gravitational lensing due to uneven gravity in the lensing object.&lt;p&gt;Essentially, if you randomize the field enough, you can eventually find, after enough trials, something that seems to match reality. And it just so happens axions are the nice random variables we needed to inject.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s where we&amp;#x27;re at: Just randomly select some parameters until the data fits, and lo and behold, it fits.</text></comment>
<story><title>Heavy particles don’t explain gravitational lensing oddities</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/gravitational-lensing-may-point-to-lighter-dark-matter-candidate/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Zamicol</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to see more work done with investigating field self-interaction.&lt;p&gt;This 2020 paper by Alexandre Deur is very interesting.  &amp;quot;[W]e find that relativistic corrections to the rotation curves of disk galaxies are significant at large galactic radii.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Relativistic corrections to the rotation curves of disk galaxies&amp;quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;2004.05905.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;2004.05905.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And a blog covering the paper: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;astrobites.org&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;17&amp;#x2F;the-alternative-to-dark-matter-may-be-general-relativity-itself&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;astrobites.org&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;17&amp;#x2F;the-alternative-to-dark-ma...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>