The Milky Way and its nearest giant neighbor Andromeda (M31) are surrounded by a swarm of dwarf satellite galaxies. Aside from relatively large beasties like the Large Magellanic Cloud or M32, the majority of these are the so-called dwarf spheroidals. There are several dozen examples known around each giant host, like the Fornax dwarf pictured above.

The Milky Way Galaxy in which we live seems to be a normal spiral galaxy. But it can be hard to tell. Our perspective from within it precludes a “face-on” view like the picture above, which combines some real data with a lot of artistic liberty. Some local details we can measure in extraordinary detail, but the big picture is hard. Just how big is the Milky Way?

There are two basic approaches to cosmology: start at redshift zero and work outwards in space, or start at the beginning of time and work forward. The latter approach is generally favored by theorists, as much of the physics of the early universe follows a “clean” thermal progression, cooling adiabatically as it expands.

As soon as I wrote it, I realized that the title is much more general than anything that can be fit in a blog post. Bekenstein argued long ago that the missing mass problem should instead be called the acceleration discrepancy, because that’s what it is – a discrepancy that occurs in conventional dynamics at a particular acceleration scale. So in that sense, it is the entire history of dark matter.

One experience I’ve frequently had in Astronomy is that there is no result so obvious that someone won’t claim the exact opposite. Indeed, the more obvious the result, the louder the claim to contradict it. This happened today with a new article in Nature Astronomy by Rodrigues, Marra, del Popolo, & Davari titled Absence of a fundamental acceleration scale in galaxies . This title is the opposite of true.

The radial acceleration relation is consistent with a single effective force law with a universal critical acceleration scale.

A recently discovered dwarf galaxy designated NGC1052-DF2 has been in the news lately. Apparently a satellite of the giant elliptical NGC 1052, DF2 (as I’ll call it from here on out) is remarkable for having a surprisingly low velocity dispersion for a galaxy of its type. These results were reported in Nature last week by van Dokkum et al., and have caused a bit of a stir. It is common for giant galaxies to have some dwarf satellite galaxies.

The Star Forming Main Sequence relates star formation rate to stellar mass. By exploring a large dynamic range in mass with dwarf galaxies, we require the mathematically expected slope that has eluded most work on the subject.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little.

I have not posted here in a while. This is mostly due to the fact that I have a job that is both engaging and demanding. I started this blog as a way to blow off steam, but I realized this mostly meant ranting about those fools at the academy! of whom there are indeed plenty.

It has been twenty years since we coined the phrase NFW halo to describe the cuspy halos that emerge from dark matter simulations of structure formation. Since that time, observations have persistently contradicted this fundamental prediction of the cold dark matter cosmogony. There have, of course, been some theorists who cling to the false hope that somehow it is the data to blame and not a shortcoming of the model.