And Just Like That… All the Imaginary Dark Matter in the Universe Disappeared

Modified gravity?

Modified Newtonian Gravity, or MOND has been around for a while. The proponents insist that we don't need dark matter to explain the high rotation of galaxies. We just need to modify the equations of gravity we think we know. However, most scientists don't take it seriously anymore.

Something is causing the extra gravitational lensing outside of galaxy clusters. The bullet cluster mostly killed off MOND for a reason. We also know of seven galaxies that orbit at the lower speeds we would have expected based only on the matter we can see. Apparently, they lack dark matter. If MOND was real, those galaxies couldn't exist.

Based on that other evidence, I suspect that this study will be refuted at some point. (Using statistical methods to de-project the proper motions of the stars sounds fishy to me, though I don't know that much about Monte Carlo algorithms.)

It would be cool to find out something this big about cosmology, but we can't call dark matter "imaginary" based on this alone. This study and that quote will probably be all over the popular press though.