Astrophysics Debate: Is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) on the way in, and "Dark Matter" on the way out?

The Satellite
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The latest published research seems to suggest just that, though the study’s author admits that merging MOND with Einstein’s Relativity is still proving difficult.

Read on:

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Gonna be several long years of wait and see. I just did an episode on Dark Matter last week for USC’s School of Engineering/National Academy of Engineers

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Good piece!

At this point, McGaugh’s theory would be novel.

But if he can reconcile it with Relativity…then he could become CWRU’s fifth Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

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Not sure it’s correct to call it his theory or any of the guys mentioned. Schools often
publish this type of stuff that kinda plays hard and fast with facts, in a goal I guess to solicit pride and more donations. We’ve seen the same type of stuff from UH too.

Still, MOND doesn’t seem to be his theory at all, but perhaps the contributions made in support of this theory are significant. Way out of my league to even assess that.

Here is some background on MOND

MOND was developed in 1982 and presented in 1983 by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom.[3] Milgrom noted that galaxy rotation curve data, which seemed to show that galaxies contain more matter than is observed, could also be explained if the gravitational force experienced by a star in the outer regions of a galaxy decays more slowly than predicted by Newton’s law of gravity. MOND modifies Newton’s laws for extremely small accelerations (characteristic of the outer regions of galaxies, or the inter-galaxy forces within galaxy clusters), fitting the galaxy rotation curve data.[4] In addition, the theory predicts that the mass of the Galactic Centershould even affect the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects.[5]

A minority of astrophysicists continue to work on the theory. Jacob Bekenstein developed a relativistic generalization of MOND in 2004, TeVeS, which however had its own set of problems. Another notable attempt was by Constantinos Skordis and Tom Złośnik, who proposed a relativistic model of MOND in 2021 that claimed to explain the cosmic microwave background, but appears to be highly contrived.[1]

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Then what is novel is the observational data that he has published SUPPORTING the theory, and appearing to debunk dark matter. It appears to be a new and original contribution to the field.

We’ll see if he can reconcile it with Einstein’s relativity.