A better term for "dark matter"

On Sat, 29 Sep 12 01:06:15 GMT, Nicolaas Vroom wrote:
The following document gives maybe some answers:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5037
"A huge reservoir of ionized gas around the Milky Way:
Accounting for the Missing Mass?"
... When I understand the article correct there is a hugh amount of
baryonic gas of ionized metals around the Milky Way.

I wouldn't be hasty about accepting the conclusions of papers like
this. Many assumptions go into their technique, basically they are
calculating the "halo mass" from absorption line widths. That's a lot
of mass from each assumption and each micrometer of line width. This
"column density ratio" calculation depends on the state of the matter
and any rotation present -- any unmodelled dispersion will yield false
high answers. These authors have modelled these lines as saturated,
in departure from previous authors, see the bottom of their page 5.
From this assumption (and the others) springs a galaxy's worth of
extra matter -- yeah, right.

There was a paper a few years back, I don't have the citation, a
galaxy spectrum was taken and double lines were found. So they didn't
know what to make of that, so they came up with a model where the
galaxy was being disrupted by a hot expanding bubble of gas, thus a
hollow expanding galaxy. Silly idea, but all the press releases hyped
it up like a major new finding. All from a couple of double lines
that they couldn't figure out, chee.

If you look at the literature of 100 years ago, you'll find that many
if not most of them were poppycock. Today, too. This paper is no
game changer.

Eric