Bibcode
Scarpa, Riccardo
Bibliographical reference
1st CRISIS IN COSMOLOGY CONFERENCE, CCC-1. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 822, pp. 253-265 (2006).
Advertised on:
3
2006
Citations
36
Refereed citations
28
Description
By the time, in 1937, the Swiss astronomer Zwicky measured the velocity
dispersion of the Coma cluster of galaxies, astronomers somehow got
acquainted with the idea that the universe is filled by some kind of
dark matter. After almost a century of investigations, we have learned
two things about dark matter, (i) it has to be non-baryonic - that is,
made of something new that interact with normal matter only by
gravitation- and, (ii) that its effects are observed in stellar systems
when and only when their internal acceleration of gravity falls below a
fix value a0=1.2×10-8 cm s-2. Being
completely decoupled dark and normal matter can mix in any ratio to form
the objects we see in the universe, and indeed observations show the
relative content of dark matter to vary dramatically from object to
object. This is in open contrast with point (ii). In fact, there is no
reason why normal and dark matter should conspire to mix in just the
right way for the mass discrepancy to appear always below a fixed
acceleration. This systematic, more than anything else, tells us we
might be facing a failure of the law of gravity in the weak field limit
rather then the effects of dark matter. Thus, in an attempt to avoid the
need for dark matter many modifications of the law of gravity have been
proposed in the past decades. The most successful - and the only one
that survived observational tests - is the Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
MOND posits a breakdown of Newton's law of gravity (or inertia) below
a0, after which the dependence with distance became linear. Despite many
attempts, MOND resisted stubbornly to be falsified as an alternative to
dark matter and succeeds in explaining the properties of an impressively
large number of objects without invoking the presence of non-baryonic
dark matter. This suggests MOND is telling us something important about
gravity in the weak field limit. In this paper, I will review the basics
of MOND and its ability to explain observations without the need of dark
matter.