“I was feeling like I was dreaming. It seemed so unreal. This is because my results did not match any previous results," said astronomer Kyu-Hyun Chae.
Direct link to the published paper.
TLDR: They are looking at distant binaries.
(Distant Binaries orbit many astronomical units from each other, Alpha Centauri A+B, are a distant binary system)
The orbital data for these systems shows a lot of variance that should not be there. One issue is there could be a third (or even forth) smaller star (brown dwarf) also present but undetectable that is causing the errors.
The research team tried to eliminate the possibility of these bodies causing the observed errors in the two body data.
They have found there is still something else happening even when this is done.
This has been published in a very respected journal so it will be interesting to see where this leads.
Any time you see any science article – especially cosmology stuff – claim some law of nature is being “proved wrong” or breaking down or failing or anything like that… it just means an edge case was found that has some tiny but statistically significant deviation from our models. It means there’s a missing piece of the puzzle that until recently was so inconsequential that we didn’t even know we were overlooking it, but that the rest of the picture is becoming so sharply focused that its absence can no longer be overlooked. Or it means the observational data simply had errors in it.
“THE SCIENTISTS WERE WRONG” in all of its various forms makes for great clickbait, but it’s only clickbait. We’re highly, highly unlikely to be finding any new models for cosmology that totally upend our understanding of the universe as we continue to shine light through the fog at the edge of our understanding. There’s vanishingly few cases of a scientist being genuinely wrong, and even fewer cases where the theory they were wrong about has any meaningful mass appeal.
Articles like this one set my hackles up. I get it, but “an observed system does not move precisely according to the predictions of our current best models of general relativity” isn’t much of a headline, especially when the research was published by a guy who’s heavily invested in proving MOND right in spite of compelling evidence that dark matter exists and the modified mechanical formulas aren’t needed.
Thought exactly the same before I read the article to the end. But they are very differentiated in interpreting their discovery and clearly point of that their findings only make better predictions for very specific cases. They explicitly also explain what cases stay unaffected. The title is of course totally misleading, gravity is not breaking down. But to anyone with an inkling of physics, the message 'we found phenomena on a stellar scale that defy explanation by general relativity" is not far behind and would actually be true :)
MOND does not describe all observed phenomena, but neither does dark matter and dark energy. We simply don’t know the truth in this area. In my opinion too much money in physics is thrown on the needle in a haystack search for dark matter.
The actual content of the article was thankfully less apocalyptic than I expected
Whew. climbs down from the ceiling.
