Comment Re:The only thing that surprises me is surprise (Score 1) 224
It doesnt actually matter how many planets or brown dwarfs you think we have missed
There are limits (for very good and well checked reasons) on how much ordinary (baryonic) matter there can actually be
We may have understimated the numbers of extrasolar planets or similar but that still wont account for the vast majority of the missing matter. In any case such calculations have been well looked at for a long period of time and screwed down pretty tight (this is what I did for my PhD almost 15 years ago. Even then it was pretty clear that brown dwarfs were not the be all and end all of accounting for dark matter within galaxies).
Regarding "move beyond the assumption that if we cant see it it isnt there"...surely that is the whole point of dark matter/dark energy. We are confident that 'something' is there, but we cant 'see' it, hence our insistence on using the term 'dark'.