This post simply announces that I will be giving a Golden Webinar at 3pm EST Friday 15 January 2021 courtesy of the Instituto de Astrofisica of the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile. The seminar is free and open to all but you need to register in advance if you want to hear it. There are many excellent speakers in previous episodes of this series that you can hear on Youtube.
People seem to like to do retrospectives at year’s end. I take a longer view, but the end of 2020 seems like a fitting time to do that. Below is the text of a paper I wrote in 1995 with collaborators at the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen. The last edit date is from December of that year, so this text (in plain TeX, not LaTeX!) is now a quarter century old. I am just going to cut & paste it as-was;
A unique prediction of MOND One curious aspect of MOND as a theory is the External Field Effect (EFE). The modified force law depends on an absolute acceleration scale, with motion being amplified over the Newtonian expectation when the force per unit mass falls below the critical acceleration scale a 0 = 1.2 x 10 -10 m/s/s. Usually we consider a galaxy to be an island universe: it is a system so isolated that we need
This post is a recent conversation with David Garofalo for his blog. Today we talk to Dr. Stacy McGaugh, Chair of the Astronomy Department at Case Western Reserve University. David : Hi Stacy. You had set out to disprove MOND and instead found evidence to support it. That sounds like the poster child for how science works. Was praise forthcoming?
The following is a guest post by Indranil Banik, Moritz Haslbauer, and Pavel Kroupa (bios at end) based on their new paper Modifying gravity to save cosmology Cosmology is currently in a major crisis because of many severe tensions, the most serious and well-known being that local observations of how quickly the Universe is expanding (the so-called ‘Hubble constant’) exceed the prediction of the standard cosmological
The missing mass problem has been with us many decades now. Going on a century if you start counting from the work of Oort and Zwicky in the 1930s. Not quite a half a century if we date it from the 1970s when most of the relevant scientific community started to take it seriously. Either way, that’s a very long time for a major problem to go unsolved in physics.
A Philosophical Approach to MOND is a new book by David Merritt. This is a major development in the both the science of cosmology and astrophysics, on the one hand, and the philosophy and history of science on the other. It should be required reading for anyone interested in any of these topics.
This Thanksgiving, I’d highlight something positive. Recently, Bob Sanders wrote a paper pointing out that gas rich galaxies are strong tests of MOND. The usual fit parameter, the stellar mass-to-light ratio, is effectively negligible when gas dominates. The MOND prediction follows straight from the gas distribution, for which there is no equivalent freedom.
In the last post, I noted some of the sociological overtones underpinning attitudes about dark matter and modified gravity theories. I didn’t get as far as the more scientifically interesting part, which illustrates a common form of reasoning in physics. About modified gravity theories, Bertone & Tait state Leaving aside just which observations need to be mimicked so precisely (I expect they mean power spectrum;
Like the Milky Way, our nearest giant neighbor, Andromeda (aka M31), has several dozen dwarf satellite galaxies. A few of these were known and had measured velocity dispersions at the time of my work with Joe Wolf, as discussed previously. Also like the Milky Way, the number of known objects has grown rapidly in recent years – thanks in this case largely to the PAndAS survey.
