[RobC (OP)]

Published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, by Dr. Jamie Farnes from the Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, offers a new explanation. Dr. Farnes says: "We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid which possesses a type of negative gravity, repelling all other material around them. Although this matter is peculiar to us, it suggests that our cosmos is symmetrical in both positive and negative qualities.

[chris]

As a non-specialist, sounds a bit iffy to me. Dark matter is aggregated into galaxies where it holds the material together and accounts for the observed rotations of the stars. Dark Energy, to my knowledge, would not appear to be aggregated in the same way...

[RobC (OP)]

Dr. Farnes says: "Previous approaches to combining dark energy and dark matter have attempted to modify Einstein's theory of general relativity, which has turned out to be incredibly challenging. This new approach takes two old ideas that are known to be compatible with Einstein's theory—negative masses and matter creation—and combines them together.
"The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses."
Proof of Dr. Farnes's theory will come from tests performed with a cutting-edge radio telescope known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international endeavor to build the world's largest telescope in which the University of Oxford is collaborating.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-universe-theory-percent-cosmos.html#jCp

[Colin2B]

Quite a bit of it is ‘iffy’.

Farnes has not only written the article but also issued a press release on the topic, a ‘look at my paper item’. When he says ‘We now think ...’ he means he thinks.

Like many before he is toying with negative mass, but he also wants it to have negative inertia ie push it away and it will move towards you. He doesn’t appear to have worked these out from scratch but plugs them into a simulation so that they work in the way he assumes they will.

This paper is at the stage that if it were posted here we would consider it a new theory and up for peer review.

The press release also sounds like a bit of advertising or justification for the university’s collaboration on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

At the moment this is a piece of very speculative conjecture, whether it develops into something of interest remains to be seen.

[RobC (OP)]

From what you are saying, awaiting confirmation by the Square Kilometre Array, is not analogous to Eddington's 1919 confirmation of Einstein's General Relativity.