MOND and the Universal Rotation Curve: similar phenomenologies

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and the Universal Rotation Curve (URC) exhibit similar phenomenological properties in galaxy rotation curves, despite their different theoretical foundations.

Contribution

The study constructs a 'MOND URC' from the URC and shows it closely matches the original URC, revealing similar behaviors and predictive capabilities of MOND and URC.

Findings

The 'MOND URC' closely resembles the URC in properties.

URC predicts a tight mass discrepancy - acceleration relation.

The relation matches observational data when Vbar minimizes differences.

Abstract

The Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and the Universal Rotation Curve (URC) are two ways to describe the general properties of rotation curves, with very different approaches concerning dark matter and gravity. Phenomenological similarities between the two approaches are studied by looking for properties predicted in one framework that are also reproducible in the other one. First, we looked for the analogous of the URC within the MOND framework. Modifying in an observationally-based way the baryonic contribution Vbar to the rotation curve predicted by the URC, and applying the MOND formulas to this Vbar, leads to a "MOND URC" whose properties are remarkably similar to the URC. Second, it is shown that the URC predicts a tight mass discrepancy - acceleration relation, which is a natural outcome of MOND. With the choice of Vbar that minimises the differences between the URC and the "MOND URC" the relation is almost identical to the observational one. This similarity between the observational properties of MOND and the URC has no implications about the validity of MOND as a theory of gravity, but it shows that it can reproduce in detail the phenomenology of disk galaxies' rotation curves, as described by the URC. MOND and the URC, even though they are based on totally different assumptions, are found to have very similar behaviours and to be able to reproduce each other's properties fairly well, even with the simple assumptions made on the luminosity dependence of the baryonic contribution to the rotation curve.