The Curious Engineer

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Triton Station

tritonstation.com

A blog about the science, philosophy, and sociology of astrophysics and cosmology, especially concerning dark matter and modified theories of gravity.

ScienceEssays / personal

’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
209 from 16 Apr 2016 to 26 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (20 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 17

  1. Why the search for particle dark matter is hopeless, part 1
  2. Ghostly galaxies in the news
  3. CDM, what would Popper do?
  4. What can’t it be?
  5. You have one (1) dark matter particle detection
  6. The External Field Effect and Tests of MOND on Cosmological Scales
  7. The contradiction in our dark matter
  8. The blinding influence of the Bullet Cluster
  9. Missing baryons: LCDM and MOND compared
  10. Local baryons in simulations and reality
  11. The local missing baryon problem
  12. Extended Tully-Fisher relations
  13. Yep, it’s a religion
  14. The well of inspiration
  15. Paradigm Shifts in Modern Astrophysics
  16. Asteroids that spin really fast
  17. Very thin galaxies

2025 20

  1. Has dark matter been detected in the Milky Way?
  2. The odd primordial halo of the Milky Way
  3. The baryonic sizes and masses of late type galaxies, and a bit about their angular momentum
  4. Non-equilibrium dynamics in galaxies that appear to have lots of dark matter: ultrafaint dwarfs
  5. Non-equilibrium dynamics in galaxies that appear to lack dark matter: ultradiffuse galaxies
  6. Non-equilibrium dynamics in galaxies that appear to lack dark matter: tidal dwarf galaxies
  7. The minimum acceleration in intergalactic space
  8. The baryons are mostly in the intergalactic medium. Mostly.
  9. ( There are none )
  10. The Deuterium-Lithium tension in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
  11. Some more persistent cosmic tensions
  12. Some persistent cosmic tensions
  13. NEIU debate: dark matter or modified gravity
  14. Dark Matter or Modified Gravity? A virtual panel discussion
  15. Things I don’t understand in modified dynamics (it’s cosmology)
  16. Kinematics suggest large masses for high redshift galaxies
  17. The fault in our stars: blame them, not the dark matter!
  18. Old galaxies in the early universe
  19. Measuring the growth of the stellar mass of galaxies over cosmic time
  20. A few videos for the new year

2024 23

  1. On the timescale for galaxy formation
  2. Massive Galaxies at High Redshift: we told you so
  3. What if we never find dark matter?
  4. A Nobel prize in physics for something that is not physics
  5. Sociology in the hunt for dark matter
  6. Nobel prizes that were, that might have been, and others that have not yet come to pass
  7. Progressive Approximations in Mass Modeling
  8. Decision Trees & Philosophical Blunders
  9. Why’d it have to be MOND?
  10. The Radial Acceleration Relation starting from high accelerations
  11. The Radial Acceleration Relation to very low accelerations
  12. Tully-Fisher from gravitational lensing
  13. Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
  14. Updated WIMP Exclusion Diagram
  15. Aurora Over Ohio
  16. The MHONGOOSE survey of atomic gas in and around galaxies
  17. The Eclipse Experience
  18. Eclipse Day: 8 April 2024
  19. It is not linear
  20. The evolution of the luminosity density
  21. Clusters of galaxies ruin everything
  22. Quantifying the excess masses of high redshift galaxies
  23. Discussion of Dark Matter and Modified Gravity

2023 29

  1. Holiday Concordance
  2. Global climate basics
  3. Cop28 president not even trying to hide his obvious bias
  4. A post in which some value judgements are made about the situation with wide binaries
  5. Full speed in reverse!
  6. Wide binary debate heats up again
  7. How things go mostly right or badly wrong
  8. A Response to Recent Developments Concerning the Gravitational Potential of the Milky Way
  9. OSIRIS-REx returns safely
  10. Recent Developments Concerning the Gravitational Potential of the Milky Way. III. A Closer Look at the RAR Model
  11. Recent Developments Concerning the Gravitational Potential of the Milky Way. II. A Closer Look at the Data
  12. Recent Developments Concerning the Gravitational Potential of the Milky Way. I.
  13. Is the Milky Way’s rotation curve declining?
  14. Wide Binary Results Favoring MOND
  15. Required dark matter properties
  16. Is NGC 1277 a problem for MOND?
  17. Checking in on Troubles with Dark Matter
  18. The MOND at 40 conference
  19. Commentary on Wide Binaries
  20. Wide Binary Weirdness
  21. A few words about the Milky Way
  22. Can’t be explained by science!
  23. Ask and receive
  24. Take it where?
  25. Imagine if you can
  26. Early Galaxy Formation and the Hubble Constant Tension
  27. Let’s just ignore it
  28. What we have here is a failure to communicate
  29. Question of the Year (and a challenge)

2022 24

  1. Remain Skeptical
  2. Artistic license with the dark matter tree
  3. The Angel Particle
  4. Tooth Fairies & Auxiliary Hypotheses
  5. Not quiet on the northern front
  6. Define “better”
  7. By the wayside
  8. An early result from JWST
  9. JWST Twitter Bender
  10. LZ: another non-detection
  11. Some Outsider Perspective from Insiders
  12. When you have eliminated the impossible…
  13. Cosmic whack-a-mole
  14. Two Hypotheses
  15. Galaxy Formation – a few basics
  16. Primer on Galaxy Properties
  17. Common ground
  18. Are there credible deviations from the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation?
  19. Galaxy models in compressed halos
  20. What should we expect for the radial acceleration relation?
  21. A brief history of the Radial Acceleration Relation
  22. A script for every observational test
  23. The curious case of AGC 114905: an isolated galaxy devoid of dark matter?
  24. What JWST will see

2021 14

  1. A few of Zwicky’s rants
  2. Super spirals on the Tully-Fisher relation
  3. Leveling the Playing Field of Dwarf Galaxy Kinematics
  4. The neutrino mass hierarchy and cosmological limits on their mass
  5. Divergence
  6. The RAR extended by weak lensing
  7. Despondency
  8. Bias all the way down
  9. Divergence
  10. Galaxy Stellar and Halo Masses: tension between abundance matching and kinematics
  11. The Fat One – a test of structure formation with the most massive cluster of galaxies
  12. Does Newton’s Constant Vary?
  13. Golden Webinar
  14. A Stellar Population Mystery in a Low Surface Brightness Galaxy

2020 14

  1. 25 years a heretic
  2. Statistical detection of the external field effect from large scale structure
  3. Oh… you don’t want to look in there
  4. Big Trouble in a Deep Void
  5. A lengthy personal experience with experimental searches for WIMPs
  6. Cosmology, then and now
  7. Second peak bang on
  8. A pre-history of the prediction of the amplitude of the second peak of the cosmic microwave background
  9. A Significant Theoretical Advance
  10. A Philosophical Approach to MOND
  11. The Hubble Constant from the Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation
  12. Tracing the baryons in star forming galaxies
  13. Predictive Power in Science
  14. The halo mass function

2019 4

  1. Fuzzy Thing!
  2. New web domain
  3. Two fields divided by a common interest
  4. A personal recollection of how we learned to stop worrying and love the Lambda

2018 13

  1. Hypothesis testing with gas rich galaxies
  2. It Must Be So. But which Must?
  3. The arrogance of ignorance
  4. Dwarf Satellite Galaxies. III. The dwarfs of Andromeda
  5. Dwarf Satellite Galaxies. II. Non-equilibrium effects in ultrafaint dwarfs
  6. Astronomical Acceleration Scales
  7. Dwarf Satellite Galaxies and Low Surface Brightness Galaxies in the Field. I.
  8. A Precise Milky Way
  9. The next cosmic frontier: 21cm absorption at high redshift
  10. A brief history of the acceleration discrepancy
  11. The Acceleration Scale in the Data
  12. RAR fits to individual galaxies
  13. The dwarf galaxy NGC1052-DF2

2017 19

  1. The Star Forming Main Sequence – Dwarf Style
  2. Yes, Virginia, there is a Dark Matter
  3. The kids are all right, but they can’t interpret a graph
  4. Ain’t no cusps here
  5. Dwarf Galaxies on the Shoulders of Giants
  6. Solution Aversion
  7. Degenerating problemshift: a wedged paradigm in great tightness
  8. Cepheids & Gaia: No Systematic in the Hubble Constant
  9. Critical Examination of the Impossible
  10. Cosmology and Convention (continued)
  11. Declining Rotation Curves at High Redshift?
  12. Hubble constant redux
  13. Neutrinos got mass!
  14. LCDM has met the enemy, and it is itself
  15. DTM’s Remembering Vera
  16. Tension in the Hubble constant
  17. Emergent Gravity hits a pothole
  18. One Law to Rule Them All
  19. Ode to Vera

2016 32

  1. Crater 2: the Bullet Cluster of LCDM
  2. Crater 2: prediction verified.
  3. Reckless disregard for the scientific method
  4. Going in Circles
  5. What is Natural?
  6. Pulp Science
  7. Xkcdd
  8. Another quick-trick simulation result
  9. The Grand Observational Challenge for Galaxy Formation Simulations
  10. La Fin de Quoi?
  11. Four Strikes
  12. The Third Law of Galactic Rotation
  13. Tully-Fisher: the Second Law
  14. What is the Baryon Density, Anyway?
  15. Missing baryons in LCDM and MOND
  16. Missing Baryons
  17. Natural Law
  18. The Central Density Relation
  19. Sparc
  20. What is theory?
  21. What is empirical?
  22. Structure Formation Mythology
  23. Plate of Shrimp
  24. New York’s all right if you like saxophones
  25. Dark Matter halo fits – today’s cut
  26. And then there were six
  27. Two Numbers
  28. Falsifiability and Persuadability in Science
  29. Some rethinking
  30. Rethinking the Dark Matter Paradigm
  31. Who am I?
  32. Hello, World