Our theories may be wrong?!? That IS Good News.

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Fantastic item from http://www.newscientist.com/this evening. Mystery of the missing mini-galaxies explores an issue with the number of mini-galaxies orbiting our Milky Way galaxy.

As far as we can tell, barely 25 straggly satellites loiter forlornly around the outskirts of the Milky Way. “We see only about 1 per cent of the predicted number of satellite galaxies,” says Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn in Germany. “It is the cleanest case in which we can see there is something badly wrong with our standard picture of the origin of galaxies.”

And another issue had been reported earlier where

… most of those galaxies orbit the Milky Way in an unexpected manner and that, taken together, their results are at odds with mainstream cosmology. There is “only one way” to explain the results, says Kroupa: “Gravity has to be stronger than predicted by Newton.”

This latest data is a problem for ‘cold dark matter’ theories which predicted many times more satellite galaxies than have been found. The data supports modified gravity theories.

It’s great for science when evidence mounts that current established theories, such as Newtonian Gravity, need modification. Science is a process that re-works theories to fit all available data. Evidence from nature is the only supreme truth. No theory about how things work is ever accepted as 100% certain and it’s good to be sceptical of current theories no matter how well they may fit available data. When science runs into an uncomfortable truth, it is scientific theories that bend. Science does not bend the evidence to fit the orthodoxy.

Readers may care to consider for themselves how this process differs from theological practice.