Does Dark Matter Encircle Earth?

Does dark matter circle the earth? Only if you count the TV broadcast signals....

Is anyone else bothered that they infer its existence, but state there's five times as much of it as normal matter?

It not what or why it matters....it's that it doesn't matter.

Yeah...but these blokes say it DOES matter...to the point that it keeps us from spiraling into the sun and moon, or some such great foolishness! 5X the amount of gravity from it and all that.

IF'n when they actually get to measure the eddys and currents of the soup we're in then it still borscht to me.

Yes but we know it as stupidity and it amasses 5X rational thinking thus weighing down our solar system.

Yeah, but what's stopping it from spreading to the rest of the neighborhood?

The proximity mines called the Kuiper belt.

Lovely! Just what every self-respecting solar system needs........its very own home made cocktail ice cubes. We should have a beverage named accordingly...the Tunguska Tickle?...if only for the event of a lifetime.

The whole idea of dark matter is that from current knowledge of matter and its interactions that the universe behaves if it had 6 times as much matter as we can detect. This can mean many things:

1) There are WIMPs (Dark Matter), particles that aren't predicted by otherwise reliable theories

2) There are undetectable forces in nature

3) Current understanding of forces changes on astronomical scales

4) There are force phenomena, such as boundary conditions, boundary layers, and shock waves that have yet to be explained.

I'm willing to bet it is 4 because there are soo many odd phenomena that have already been detected that have the same "Dark Matter" effect. Zeta Potential and Van der Waals are two examples where the interacting bodies and boundary conditions cause odd effects. There are plenty of these discrete phenomena and they are very difficult to understand and nearly impossible to simulate. When you also have gravitational lensing, blackholes, antimatter, shockwaves, pulsars, all the possible particle interactions and other astonomical beasts adding all sorts of possiblities and making so much research inconclusive things get complicated. The fact that we are on the inside looking out also makes things alot more difficult. "Dark Matter" could be explained in many ways, but WIMPs are only one possible explanation for what is going on.

Just had to get that off my chest. My money is on 4