Gravitational theory, galaxy rotation curves and cosmology without dark matter

By J. W. Moffat. 2004

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Einstein gravity coupled to a massive skew symmetric field Fμνλ leads to an acceleration law that modifies the Newtonian law of attraction between particles. We use a framework of non-perturbative renormalization group equations as well as observational input to characterize special renormalization group trajectories to allow for the running of the effective gravitational coupling G and the coupling of the skew field to matter. Strong renormalization effects occur at large and small momentum scales. The latter lead to an increase of Newton’s constant at large galactic and cosmological distances. For weak fields a fit to the flat rotation curves of galaxies is obtained in terms of the mass (mass-to-light ratio M/L) of galaxies. The fits assume that the galaxies are not dominated by exotic dark matter and that the effective gravitational constant G runs with the distance scale. The equations of motion for test particles yield predictions for the solar system and the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16 that agree with the observations. The gravitational lensing of clusters of galaxies can be explained without exotic dark matter. A Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker cosmological model with an effective G = G(t) running with time can lead to consistent fits to cosmological data without assuming the existence of exotic cold dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cecb68aa326adbf776e4b589419f649c964f5452

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Orbital Poles of Milky Way Satellite Galaxies: A Rotationally Supported Disk of Satellites (2008, background): “Among contesters for such theories are MOG (Moffat 2005) andMOND/TeVeS (Bekenstein &Milgrom 1984; Bekenstein 2004).”
The Bullet Cluster 1E0657-558 evidence shows modified gravity in the absence of dark matter (2007, methodology): “…of modified gravity – or MOG model – based upon a covariant generalization of Einstein’s theory with auxiliary (gravitational) fields in addition to the metric was proposed in Moffat (2005, 2006b) including metric skewtensor gravity (MSTG) theory and scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG) theory.”
Galaxy cluster masses without non-baryonic dark matter (2005, methodology): “…mass in MSTG can be obtained as a function of radial position by substituting the MSTG gravitational acceleration law (Brownstein & Moffat 2005; Moffat 2005, 2006): a(r ) = − G(r )M r 2 , (20) so that our result for the isothermal β-model becomes MMSTG(r ) = 3βkT μmpG(r ) ( r 3 r 2 + r 2c ) .”
On the Hubble Constant Tension in the SNe Ia Pantheon Sample (2021, background): “…of the state for dark energy, dependent on redshift, =w w z( ), with a wide range of theories (Armendariz-Picon et al. 2000; Zimdahl et al. 2001; Moffat 2005; Grande et al. 2006; Caldera-Cabral et al. 2009; Yoo & Watanabe 2012; Benisty & Guendelman 2018; Mörtsell & Dhawan 2018; Anagnostopoulos…”
Galaxy Rotation Curves without Nonbaryonic Dark Matter (2005, background): “A gravity theory consisting of a metric-skew-tensor action that leads to a modified Newtonian acceleration law (Moffat 2005a, 2005b) can be fitted to a large class of galaxy rotation curves.”