Well, well.  We finally have an article published that kicks some sand in the face of Mainstreamers!

Check this out and let's have some commentary:

Study plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis

Regards,
Mike Petersen

That's an interesting-sounding article in there, though it would completely fails the likes of the Wikipedia NPOV (neutral point-of-view) rule. I dislike it when articles are written by anonymous authors who pull tricks like trotting out things like "Famous astrophysicist Bob Sanders" without mentioning that Bob is a very strong proponent of MOND in the first place!

That said, it's interesting work they're doing. From the preprint of one of their papers:

The paper said:

An alternative scenario for the origin of the dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way goes back to an observation already made by Zwicky in the 1950s. He pointed out that galaxies may form anti-hierarchically in the material thrown out off interacting large galaxies. These nowadays called tidal dwarf galaxies (TDG, Mirabel et al. 1992) are well known to form in the Universe (e.g.Weilbacher et al. 2003;Walter et al. 2006). Based on the identification of streams of satellite galaxies and globular clusters on the sky, in a pioneering work Lynden-Bell (1983) had suggested that the dwarf spheroidals originate from the break up of a former larger galaxy. With the growing success of the dark matter theory this idea was, however, often overlooked and dwarf galaxies were naturally identified with accreted cosmological sub-structures. Kroupa et al. (2005) highlighted the issue again deeming the great plane of the MW satellites to be inconsistent with the CDM theory. Indeed, there is a strong correlation of the orbital poles of the satellites (Palma et al. 2002; Metz et al. 2008) suggesting a common origin.

(emphases mine)

Nice shots across the bow :)

I must admit these days to being really intrigued with the Dark Matter versus MOND/TeVeS wars. I had no idea MOND was so antithetical to the dark matter hypothesis until not so very long ago.

As an aside, some days it would be wonderful to see an article like this on PhysOrg without all of the my-theory-explains-everything hijacking the comments :)

Yes, the whackos certainly crawled out from the woodwork to comment, didn't they?  Some of the drivel they were spouting, well, let's just say it was nonsense and let it go at that.

I noticed as well that it was anonymously written.  What's up with that?  Is everyone afraid to sign their name to something that is ATM?  Do mainstreamers actually wield that much power?

Disturbing questions, and the answers are probably just as disturbing.

I noticed as well that it was anonymously written.  What's up with that?  Is everyone afraid to sign their name to something that is ATM?  Do mainstreamers actually wield that much power?

Journalists aren't terribly afraid to sign their names, especially to the more "mainstream controversial" pieces - you see stuff like this in Astronomy without too much ado. Not signing the article is unprofessional if it's a journalist, and extraordinarily tacky if it's a co-researcher or grad student of the people in question. It looks like, in a lot of spots, the university just published the news item out to the wires and people just pulled it down verbatim. (Did anyone other than Tudor Vieru of Softpedia actually report on it?)

That aside...

I was listening to Steven Novella's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - which is, despite the flavour of the title, not about astronomy or the like - on this past week's podcast and this research actually came up. (Check episode # 198 here if you can listen to podcasts. It comes up pretty early in the program)

That made me pretty happy, as I must say I'm a big (albeit relatively recent) fan of Novella's show and his work. They seemed pretty intrigued by it all, but also mentioned that other people have previously told them that dark matter still explains features of the Big Bang that MOND lacks, so MOND might have some more work to do.

Ha! Take that, MOND!

Wait, what?