[rocqua]

I used to think this, but dark matter does make useful predictions, that are hard to explain otherwise.

This is partially because there are two ways to detect dark-matter. The first is gravitational lensing. The second is the rotatinal speed of galaxies. There are some galaxies that need less Dark Matter to explain their rotational speed. We can then cross check whether those galaxies cause less gravitational lensing.

Besides that, the gravitational lensing of galaxies being stronger than the bright matter in the galaxies can justify is hard to explain without dark matter.

[jampekka]

The problem with dark matter is that there's no (working) theory on how the dark matter is distributed. It's really easy to "explain" gravitational effects if you can postulate extra mass ad-hoc to fit the observations.

[kaibee]

I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?). So essentially a galaxy would be full of these particles zipping around never colliding with anything. And over time, some/most of these particles would have stable orbits (as the ones in unstable orbits would have flown off by now) around the galactic core. And to an observer, it would look like a gravitational tractor ahead of the rest of the physical mass of the galaxy (which is slower because it is affected by things like friction and collisions?). And so you'd see galaxies where the arms are spinning faster than they should be?

[nyssos]

> I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?).

Not even anything that extreme. What's ruled out is interaction via electromagnetism (or if you want to get really nit-picky, electromagnetic interaction with a strength above some extremely low threshold).

[rocqua]

If there are two different types of observations, and one parameter can explain both, that is pretty strong evidence. Put differently, dark matter is falsifyable, and experiments have tried to falsify it without success.

Besides the idea 'not all mass can be seen optically' is not that surprising. The many theories on what that mass might be are all speculation, but they are treated as such.

[XorNot]

It's worth noting that one dark matter explanation is just: it's cold matter we just can't see through telescopes. Or black holes without accretion disks.

Both of these are pretty much ruled out though: you can't plausibly add enough brown dwarfs, and if it's black holes then you should see more lensing events towards nearby stars given how many you'd need.

But they're both concrete predictions which are falsifiable (or boundable such that they can't be the dominant contributors).