Unifying all mass discrepancies with one effective gravity law?

TL;DR

This paper explores a unified effective gravity law, EMOND, that accounts for mass discrepancies in galaxies and clusters by depending on acceleration and potential well depth, successfully reproducing observations.

Contribution

The paper introduces EMOND, a phenomenological gravity framework that unifies mass discrepancy explanations across different astrophysical systems by incorporating potential well depth.

Findings

EMOND reproduces mass discrepancies in galaxies and clusters.

It explains offsets between gravity peaks and baryonic peaks.

The framework extends classical gravitational potential theory.

Abstract

A remarkably tight relation is observed between the Newtonian gravity sourced by the baryons and the actual gravity in galaxies of all sizes. This can be interpreted as the effect of a single effective force law depending on acceleration. This is however not the case in larger systems with much deeper potential wells, such as galaxy clusters. Here we explore the possibility of an effective force law reproducing mass discrepancies in all extragalactic systems when depending on both acceleration and the depth of the potential well. We exhibit, at least at a phenomenological level, one such possible construction in the classical gravitational potential theory. Interestingly, the framework, dubbed EMOND, is able to reproduce the observed mass discrepancies in both galaxies and galaxy clusters, and to produce multi-center systems with offsets between the peaks of gravity and the peaks of the baryonic distribution.