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Comment on Collins'es Paper

November 11, 2007 by Anonymous, 1 year 51 weeks ago
Comment id: 25904

Mr. Collins,

I read your paper carefully. (Don't you wish everyone would read things carefully before spouting off?)

At first, I was prejudiced by the title... but it turns out to be very, very misleading. Your hypothesis has nothing to do with "particles" or with "Chambers". It is simply an analysis of how much dust could contribute to the mass of a galaxy. A title that reflects that would have been better.

Second, your argument regarding the visibility of dust is specious. How well a human being can resolve a dust mote at a distance is immaterial to its detectability en mass when illuminated by starlight. Your argument is that a dust mote would not be resolvable as a disc beyond a meter or so... by that same argument, since the human eye can't resolve the disc of the stars, they shouldn't be visible!!! But, obviously, they are visible, even to the naked human eye, much more to astromical instruments. Dust motes would be visible as scattering centers of starlight, as they are in certain nebulae.... or even the Zodiacal light and gegenshein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light

The existence of such particles is known and already accounted for. Within our own galaxy, the dust along the plane of the spiral arms has been observed and calculated. This is not the source of the unaccounted for extra mass required to explain the higher than expected radial velocities of stars within galaxies or the orbits of galaxies around one another.

--Candice H. Brown Elliott

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