Another Physics Theory Thrown in the Trash; Is This a Farewell to Dark Matter?

The world of physics is being shaken. Recently, CERN has disproved Einsteins Relativety Theory (E=MC^2), leaving physicists all over the world questioning everything they know about how the universe works. If it is possible to go faster than the speed of light then so many theories about how the universe began and works may be completely wrong, sending the world of physics back to square one.

Now a new discovery has crippled an already battered science and is making so much of physicist knowledge redundant.

Most people have heard of dark matter. Whether it be on a sci-fi film, a physics lesson or from the mouth of famous scientists such as Stephen Hawkings and Brain Cox, we all know a little something about it.

Dark matter is believed to make up approximately 23% of all matter in the universe and is crucialfoster galaxy formation. It's an important thing in the world of Cosmology, yet the one place scientists were pretty certain where dark matter would be there is none.

It was widely believed that dark matter was in the regions around the sun and so Moni-Bidin and his colleges used the European Southern Observatory's La Silla and Las Campanas telescopes in Chile to map the motions of over 400 stars, most of which Red Giants (the first form a normal sized star (like our sun) takes after it begins to run out of hydrogen fuel) that spread to almost 13,000 light years away from our sun. The scientists measured their movements and expected them to differ from the movements affected by visible matter but it was revealed that they were exactly the same, proof that dark matter does not in fact exist, and Moni-Bidin himself said that "These observations point to the fact that in this volume [of space], there is no dark matter."

A necessary and widely believed idea has now been thrown to the dogs and the scientists who still think that dark matter exists have become a rare breed, but they are doing all they can to find proof of dark matter.

Avi Loeb from Harvard University (chair of the astronomy department), who was no part of these experiments, claims that dark matter does still exist and says that if dark matter does not exist the things it was believed responsible for could only be done by the modification of gravity.

With dark matter being almost disproved and the Relativety Theory pretty much gone what is there left for physics? Is a strongly believed science now back to square one?

Sources

Than, Ker. "Dark Matter Is Missing in Sun's Neighborhood?" National Geographic News. April 2012.