At www.physorg.com/print190569543.html (April 15th 2010) is a piece on the dust between planets that scatters sunlight. Its origins are in comets according to Nesvorny and Jennisken (April 20th, The Astrophysical Journal). The zodiacal dust cloud is regularly replenished.
Jenniskens pops up again in more recent research, as the head of California's Meteor Surveillance team that monitors the night sky with low light video cameras. The aim is to map the meteor showers in the sky over San Francisco Bay (see www.physorg.com/print232278276.html). The idea is to determine the orbits of the meteor showers. It seems the earth was impacted for a few hours by a stream of cometary dust last February as a result of a comet on a 60 year orbit.
Meanwhile, at www.physorg.com/print232276878.html … is dark matter an illusion caused by the quantum vacuum? When polarised, virtual gravitational dipoles in the quantum vacuum can produce a stronger than predicted gravitational field. Mainstream physics currently assumes there is only a positive gravitation charge – we might wonder how the article would proceed if they recognised a negative charge. Anyway, the problem being addressed is that galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than expected given the amount of existing baryonic (normal) matter. The fast orbit requires a larger central mass than the nearby stars, dust, and other object that led scientists to propose that every galaxy resides in a halo of as yet undetectable dark matter made of non-baryonic particles. CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic is sceptical of dark matter and has proposed that the illusion of its existence may be caused by the gravitational polarisation of the quantum vacuum.