There are no moves afoot to make Dark Matter Day a paid federal holiday. Not yet anyway. It first must be a State, paid holiday. Like Arbor Day in Nebraska, or King Kamehameha Day in Hawaii, or Casimir Pulaski Day in Illinois. Until then, Dark Matter Day will help you remember, (without paying you), Dark Matter matters. Remember its every Halloween. There’s a webinar near you.
Your author occasionally revisits Neil Postman’s 1985 book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the Age of Show Business. I couldn’t help but remember Postman’s thesis working on this article about Dark Matter. Like everything else, Science has become show business. The ugly truth is, if no one is asking the question you want to answer, there will be no funding. Scientists have to have a constituency, because funding is competitive. All public discourse is, nowadays, a matter of show business. The peddler has to have a pitch, and in the age of the Demos, it must be appealing to everyone. Dark Matter Day, (co-opting Halloween w/out the dark spirit’s consent?) is ‘an annual… [celebration] …about the mysteries of dark matter …experiments to solve its [dark matter] mysteries.’ Yes, yes, it’s all about the data. Get your popcorn and take your seat.
If you can’t wait until October…
Oh, the glamor of Dark Matter! But a mystery? Dark Matter is not mysterious. It’s straightforward and simple. The visible universe and its parts look pretty much exactly like you would expect them to look if there was 60% - 90% more matter, (more mass) out there than we can see. The old laws of planetary motion and gravity are all working perfectly, and those laws anticipate galaxies shaped and looking like they look, if there is roughly eighty-five percent more matter (mass) present. The science guys searching for Dark Matter assume we can’t see this unseen mass because it is invisible. If it was visible, we could see it, right? Because Dark Matter is so massive, how could we miss it if we could see it? So - with this working assumption - Dark Matter is invisible - everyone searching for Dark Matter is focused on particle physics. Particle physics could accurately be described as mysterious, and invisibility is mysterious. Anyway, we decided long ago to call the universe’s missing mass Dark Matter and I am glad the current enthusiasts are keeping the name. It is the perfect descriptive term. They keep saying, “we don’t know.” That is the truth, nobody knows what Dark Matter is, including the so-called experts. But they think it is an invisible, sub-atomic particle, or maybe teeny-tiny, invisible black holes. They are all looking for something invisible.
When looking for something, one should not begin by first concluding, “it is invisible.” Or your wife misplaced it. Or someone stole it.
In a light-hearted vein we have an example below of how we have truly jumped the shark when it comes to show business and what we call the university. Professor Prescod-Weinstein has written a serious book. The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | Hachette Book Group
I suspect good professor, Black People are Luminous Matter likes the name “Dark Matter” as much as I do. But otherwise, we probably disagree about a few things. We are different: For example, even though there is no room in her sandbox for the likes of me, I don’t feel structurally oppressed. Alas, she’s never going to subscribe to Abbott’s Almanac. Intersectionality has its limits. Won’t she be surprised when she learns Frank’s Small Comets are dark small comets.
The hypothesis, “Frank’s Small Comets are Dark Matter,” is the answer to the question all the Dark Matter mavens are asking. The evidence is compelling. No one has ever seen an intact Small Comet. Even with the overwhelming visual and circumstantial evidence of Small Comet impact and debris on planetary bodies, no one has ever seen one of these small stealth snowballs in its original condition. They are not invisible, but they are small enough and dark enough no one has yet seen one. That turns out to be a pretty important test of our hypothesis’ soundness. It’s reasonable. It’s simple. Don’t you see? All we have to do is look and we can prove or disprove the hypothesis. Nobody is looking. Frank’s Small Comets are forgotten, even though the evidence for their ubiquitous impacts accumulates faster than snowdrifts in a blizzard.
New readers may be unfamiliar with Professor Louis A Frank’s discovery of Small Comets forty years ago. Forty years ago, using imaging equipment onboard the Dynamics Explorer spacecraft, Frank discovered a new class of planetary objects entering Earth’s atmosphere. His team called them Small Comets. Describing them as forty-ton snowballs wrapped in a thin carbon mantle, they discovered a lot of Small Comets, ten million a year infall into Earth’s atmosphere. Frank postulated the thin carbon mantle is what keeps these forty-ton snowballs intact. He didn’t imagine they would survive in the inner solar system as they gravitated towards the hot Sun, but they do. Their spherical carbon mantles are extremely robust heat shields. Graphite coatings on the space shuttle’s heat shield tiles are a confirming experiment. The Small Comets make it all the way to Mercury’s 850°F surface where they are spectacularly exploding on impact at speeds in excess of 20,000 mph.
In addition to the Hollows, there is speculation water-bearing micrometeoroids are responsible for a constant morning distribution of volatiles in Mercury’s exosphere. Small Collisions make a big impact on Mercury's thin atmosphere. It beggars’ belief that Frank’s Small Comet discovery is totally forgotten. You’ve got to admit, postulating water-bearing micrometeoroids as an explanation is a pretty close simulation. If Frank hadn’t discovered them, they would have to go on and invent them. Mercury is the darkest planet in the Solar System, because its surface is covered with graphite, i.e. inorganic carbon. Mercury is a necessary sideshow on our trip to the Sun, which is where the best evidence is found that Small Comets are Dark Matter.
Ninety-eight percent of the Sun is composed of Hydrogen and Helium. Other elements compose the remaining two percent. The third most common element on the Sun is O oxygen, the fourth is C carbon.
Using spectral analysis, these estimates are based on surface observations. One does not look deep into the Sun. These trace elements are concentrated on the surface. Note the out-sized ratios for oxygen and carbon. There must be a lot of small comets impacting the Sun’s surface if they are responsible for depositing these elements at this rate. Oxygen is almost one percent of the Sun’s mass. That’s a mass 3,300 times greater than the Earth’s mass. It is reasonable to assume the source of this solar Oxygen has to be the rapid disassociation of water molecules, because the Sun’s surface temperatures are around 5800K. Water molecules begin to disassociate at about 3500K. Which brings us to a most interesting observation. We have been observing water vapor (steam) in the sunspots for over one hundred years. The sunspots have a much cooler temperature than the Sun’s surface in general, about 3000K to 4500K. The perfect temperature for the oxygen and hydrogen bonds in water molecules to take their time and linger before slowly coming apart.
There is enough oxygen on the surface of the Sun to suppose its precursor source is disassociated water molecules from the small comets. Simple answer too. How do you explain the sunspots ‘making’ water with only one a fraction of the O oxygen they need? The molecular ratio is 2:1, H2O. Solar hydrogen is in ratio to surface oxygen >90:1. No one has posited an explanation of how the oxygen deficit is overcome. What does the sunspot do to aggregate the oxygen? What about all that C carbon? What explains the very high ratio of carbon to the other trace elements? Small comets? I think so. BTW, all the elements in the above table are found dissolved in Earth’s seawater.
Frank was a mathematician. He was a space physicist. He understood the laws of physics and he famously said, “I don’t make mistakes.” He calculated the Small Comet infall into Jupiter’s atmosphere at five hundred per second. That is fifteen-hundred times what Earth receives at three per second. The mass ratio of Earth to Jupiter is 317:1 but the Small Comet infall ratio is 1500:1. The infall rate increase is greater by a factor of five compared to the mass ratio of the two planets. The Sun’s mass is a thousand times greater than Jupiter’s. In the same ratio it works out to an astounding 250,000 Small Comets disintegrating on the Sun’s surface every second. No wonder Frank wanted to believe his Small Comets never made it to the Sun. I suspect 250,000 is lowballing it.
These are big numbers, big enough to make Small Comets most, and probably all, of the dark, unseen, matter of the universe. It sure is a simple hypothesis. Yes or no. Are the Small Comets out there? When we seriously look, we will find out. Yes or no. It’s that simple. It’s not like they are invisible.
I asked ChatGPT yesterday, “What are Frank's Small Comets?” I thought the ol’ girl gave a pretty good answer:
Evidently, she can't find evidence that Frank was in error. Perhaps there isn't any evidence to find.
Science has a dark side and it has been there for a long time. This focus on darkness is sad. It would be better, I think, to consider the bright side. I think you are a bright star on the dark canvas of science. I became disillusioned with dark science almost 50 years ago when I stopped subscribing to Scientific American and then, later, to National Geographic.