Ultra-diffuse cluster galaxies as key to the MOND cluster conundrum

TL;DR

This paper explores how ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) in clusters could contain a significant portion of the missing baryonic matter in MOND, potentially resolving the remaining mass discrepancy in galaxy clusters.

Contribution

It proposes that UDGs and their disrupted remnants may harbor the cluster baryonic dark matter, offering a qualitative solution to the MOND cluster conundrum.

Findings

UDGs are more massive than their stellar content suggests.

Disrupted UDGs could disperse baryonic matter into the intracluster medium.

UDGs' properties may be explained by the MOND external-field effect.

Abstract

MOND reduces greatly the mass discrepancy in clusters of galaxies, but does leave a consistent global discrepancy of about a factor of two. It has been proposed, within the minimalist and purist MOND, that clusters harbor some indigenous, yet-undetected, cluster baryonic (dark) matter (CBDM). Its total amount has to be comparable with that of the observed hot gas. Following an initial discovery by van Dokkum & al. (2015a), Koda & al. (2015) have recently identified more than a thousand ultra-diffuse galaxy-like objects (UDGs) in the Coma cluster. Robustness of the UDGs to tidal disruption seems to require, within Newtonian dynamics, that they are much more massive than their observed stellar component. Here, I propound that a considerable fraction of the CBDM is internal to UDGs, which endows them with robustness. The rest of the CBDM objects formed in now-disrupted kin of the UDGs, and is dispersed in the intracluster medium. While the discovery of cluster UDGs is not in itself a resolution of the MOND cluster conundrum, it lends greater qualitative plausibility to CBDM as its resolution, for reasons I discuss. Alternatively, if the UDGs are only now falling into Coma, their large size and very low surface brightness could result from the adiabatic inflation due to the MOND external-field effect, as described in Brada & Milgrom (2000). I also consider briefly solutions to the conundrum that invoke more elaborate extensions of purist MOND, e.g., that in clusters, the MOND constant takes up larger-than-canonical values of the MOND constant.