Dynamical Friction in Nonlocal Gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonlocal gravity, a classical extension of Einstein's theory, affects dynamical friction in galaxies, potentially mimicking dark matter effects and influencing galactic rotation dynamics.

Contribution

It derives an analogue of Chandrasekhar's dynamical friction formula within nonlocal gravity and discusses its implications for galactic rotation and dark matter simulation.

Findings

Nonlocal gravity can simulate dark matter effects in galactic dynamics.

Derived a new formula for dynamical friction in nonlocal gravity.

Implications for galaxy rotation curves and barred spiral galaxy dynamics.

Abstract

We study dynamical friction in the Newtonian regime of nonlocal gravity (NLG), which is a classical nonlocal generalization of Einstein's theory of gravitation. The nonlocal aspect of NLG simulates dark matter. The attributes of the resulting effective dark matter are described and the main physical predictions of nonlocal gravity, which has a characteristic lengthscale of order 1 kpc, for galactic dynamics are presented. Within the framework of NLG, we derive the analogue of Chandrasekhar's formula for dynamical friction. The astrophysical implications of the results for the apparent rotation of a central bar subject to dynamical friction in a barred spiral galaxy are briefly discussed.