Dr. Becky | Has JWST Shown That Dark Matter Doesn’t Exist?

That is until the James Webb Space Telescope, which has now allowed us to see galaxies at greater distances than ever before, and those galaxies are confusing us. Which is not surprising since all our models were extrapolated from what we’d seen with the Hubble Space Telescope in the nearby Universe.

So because we’re still learning about the early Universe, there’s been lots of discussion in research articles about what could explain what we’ve seen, with lots of ideas raised. One that’s been highlighted this past month is in a research paper from McGaugh and collaborators which focussed on the “over massive” galaxies that JWST has found, that I’ve covered on this channel before including their discovery, and some possible explanations for them.

Now McGaugh and collaborators have another possible explanation that these galaxies were predicted by an alternative theory of gravity, known as MOND, that doesn’t need dark matter to explain the Universe...