>>11451526I would like to point out that predicting some unseen matter exist, in order to make observations match the math, has been successfully used in the past. For example, in the late 1700s astronomers noticed that the newly discovered Uranus had an orbit wasn't matching up with good ol Newton's laws. Some people suggested that maybe gravity worked differently far away from the sun, while others suggested a large but hard to see planet was out there, disturbing Uranus's orbit. Neptune was discovered a few decades later. Neutrinos are another example; they were proposed as a way to make the conservation equations balance for beta decay, but it took quite a while to prove they exist.
Now, to be far, sometimes a new theory is needed to explain things; see the orbit of Mercury being explained by relativity and not by the proposed planet Vulcan. But assuming your current theories are fine and looking for invisible stuff messing up the results is a perfectly valid way to make scientific progress.
