I have tried very hard to remain objective and even handed, but I find that I weary of the wide binary debate. I don’t know what the right answer will turn out to be. But I do have opinions. For starters, it is a big Galaxy. There is just too much to know. When I wrote about the Milky Way earlier this year, the idea was to set up an expectation value for wide binaries in the solar neighborhood.
People have been asking me about comments in a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder. I have not watched it, but the quote I’m asked about is “the higher the uncertainty of the data, the better MOND seems to work” with the implication that this might mean that MOND is a systematic artifact of data interpretation.
One of the most interesting and contentious results concerning MOND this year has been the dynamics of wide binaries. When last I wrote on this topic, way back at the end of August, Chae (2023) and Hernandez (2023) both had new papers finding evidence for MONDian behavior in wide binaries. Since that time, they each have written additional papers on the subject.
People often ask me of how “perfect” MOND has to be. The short answer is that it agrees with galaxy data as “perfectly” as we can perceive – i.e., the scatter in the credible data is accounted for entirely by known errors and the expected scatter in stellar mass-to-light ratios. Sometimes it nevertheless looks to go badly wrong. That’s often because we need to know both the mass distribution and the kinematics perfectly.
I am primarily an extragalactic astronomer – someone who studies galaxies outside our own. Our home Galaxy is a subject in its own right. Naturally, I became curious how the Milky Way appeared in the light of the systematic behaviors we have learned from external galaxies. I first wrote a paper about it in 2008;
Continuing from last time, let’s compare recent rotation curve determinations from Gaia DR3: These are different analyses of the same dataset. The Gaia data release is immense, with billions of stars. There are gazillions of ways to parse these data. So it is reasonable to have multiple realizations, and we shouldn’t expect them to necessarily agree perfectly: do we look exclusively at K giants? A stars?
Recent results from the third data release (DR3) from Gaia has led to a flurry of papers. Some are good, some are great, some are neither of those. It is apparent from the comments last time that while I’ve kept my pledge to never dumb it down, I have perhaps been assuming more background knowledge on the part of readers than is adequate.
I think the time has come for another update on wide binaries. These were intensely debated at the conference in St. Andrews, with opposing camps saying they did or did not show MONDian behavior. Two papers by independent authors have recently been refereed and published: Chae (2023) in the Astrophysical Journal and Hernandez (2023) in Monthly Notices . These papers both find evidence for MONDian behavior in wide binaries.
Alert reader Dan Baeckström recently asked about NGC 1277, as apparently some people have been making this out to be some sort of death knell for MOND. My first reaction was NGC who? There are lots of galaxies in the New General Catalog (new in 1888, even then drawing heavily on earlier work by the Herschels). I’m well acquainted with many individual galaxies, and can recall many dozens by name, but I do not know every single thing in the NGC.
I’m back from the meeting in St. Andrews, and am mostly recovered from the jet lag and the hiking (it was hot and sunny, we did not pack for that!) and the driving on single-track roads like Mr. Toad. The A835 north from Ullapool provides some spectacular mountain views, but the A837 through Rosehall is more perilous carnival attraction than well-planned means of conveyance. As expected, the most contentious issue was that of wide binaries.
