Speaker
Description
While Dark Matter (DM) is treated as a single substance in contemporary astrophysics and cosmology research, the process whereby the DM paradigm has been established is a complex one, involving both theoretical contributions and astronomical observations. In defining this paradigm, we divide the DM epistemic terrain into an observational region, a theoretical region and an experimental region. Each region is characterised by a set of selected seminal works, with the observational region containing works reporting discoveries of gravitational anomalies which support the existence of DM and the theoretical region comprised of works postulating models which are candidate explanations for the DM phenomena. We consider here the relevant works for the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), axion, sterile neutrino, and Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) hypotheses. The experimental region is further sub-divided into the seminal works announcing the results of i) Collider searches, ii) Experiments to directly detect DM, and iii) Multi-messenger indirect DM searches. For each of the three regions, we chart the growth in the number of citations since publication of the relevant seminal works, accounting for the growing interest in the axion hypothesis, the relative decline in interest in the WIMP hypothesis, and the continuing interest in MOND despite its inability to account for most anomalous observations. We comparatively analyse trends in the citation data for the seminal works and find strong correlations between different regions of the epistemic terrain. We also briefly discuss the potential of multi-messenger astronomy, using next generation telescopes, to further define the DM paradigm.
| Stream | Science or Engineering |
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