The Bullet Cluster's 720 kiloparsec gas-lensing offset is the canonical proof of collisionless dark matter, yet the exhibit audits poorly: the system's infall velocity sits in the improbable tail of ΛCDM kinematics, Abell 520 shows a dark core where lensing mass sits with the gas and without galaxies, and offset distributions now squeeze the self-interacting variants invoked for the model's small-scale problems. The icon constrains its owner.
The model reads every offset through one lens: a collisionless particle fluid that must track the galaxies everywhere, with no second mechanism available. Conforming systems confirm the particle; anomalous ones, dark cores, strained timings, forbidden velocities, must be argued away case by case, because the particle cannot do anything else.
SCT passes the Bullet's actual test structurally: the amplified gravitating component is the coherent superposition of the comoving galaxy ensemble (P50, P52, P53), collisionless by nature since coherence is a phase relationship, not a fluid, so the effective mass rides ahead with the galaxies while the shocked, decohered gas lags. Galaxy-coincident lensing offsets are the automatic output, no particle required, and the offset's celebrated geometry discriminates in SCT's favor against any account tying gravity to the dominant baryonic gas. The framework's honesty ledger is explicit here: the registered preliminary SCT estimate of the Bullet offset came to 390 kiloparsecs against the observed 720, a factor 1.8 short, and the full merger simulation that decides whether the coherence dynamics close the gap is registered open work, with the kill condition pre-committed.
The anomaly file reads naturally in coherence terms: encounter velocities come from cascade kinematics (the El Gordo entry's physics), so the Bullet's improbable speed is expected output, and configurations like Abell 520's dark core, coherence lingering where an ensemble decohered or overlapped, are available states of a phase-structured mass component, though their quantitative reconstruction belongs to the same open simulation program.
This is the same coherence-rides-the-galaxies structure behind the two-mass SZ resolution and the DF2 decoherence. The exhibit's geometry was never the particle's private property.
PARTIAL: the qualitative offset geometry follows from coherence automatically, but the quantitative Bullet reconstruction stands at 390 versus 720 kiloparsecs pending the registered full merger simulation; the framework holds the gap as open work, not as a solved exhibit.
The registered kill is numerical: the full SCT merger simulation of the Bullet's initial conditions must produce an offset between 400 and 1000 kiloparsecs; below 400 or above 1000 falsifies the coherence dynamics at merger scale. Population-level, offset catalogs statistically demanding a particle fluid with nonzero self-interaction, distributions incompatible with phase-coherent galaxy-riding mass, would break the ensemble reading.