Bye-bye Dark Matter?

Interesting article in Science. Apparently there's a new model that may do away with the contentions Dark Matter model. First a quibble:

Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance, which makes up most of the known universe.

This sort of prose is just begging for misinterpretation. As I understand it, some of the contenders for the composition of Dark Matter are Black Holes, which we can't see because they just happen to be black, neutrinos, and dust, which are too small. Mysterious is technically true, but it's really asking for the weirdos to misread this.

But that's just a quibble. The rest is excellent:

Harvard University astrophysicist Charlie Conroy and colleagues studied these two particular clusters because they are far from the galactic centers of the Milky way and Andromeda galaxies; that distance has shielded them from cosmic turbulence and kept them—and any putative dark matter—in a relatively pristine state. Using data obtained by other astronomers, the team created computer models of what globular clusters should look like in the presence and absence of dark matter halos. Over time, clusters without dark matter slowly lose their gravitational grip on the stars at their edges, the team found, whereas those with halos hold onto these stars. Both NGC 2419 and MGC1 are missing stars at their fringes, leading the researchers to conclude that they formed in the absence of dark matter halos. The same may be true of most globular clusters in the local universe, says Conroy.

Read it all.