Wide Binaries Are Basically Newtonian in Moffat's MOG Theory

Like Deur's approach, Moffat's modified gravity theory does not predict non-Newtonian behavior that is discernible in wide binary stars.

Wide binary stars are used to test the modified gravity called Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity or MOG. This theory is based on the additional gravitational degrees of freedom, the scalar field G=GN(1+α), where GN is Newton's constant, and the massive (spin-1 graviton) vector field ϕμ. The wide binaries have separations of 2-30 kAU. The MOG acceleration law, derived from the MOG field equations and equations of motion of a massive test particle for weak gravitational fields, depends on the enhanced gravitational constant G=GN(1+α) and the effective running mass μ. The magnitude of α depends on the physical length scale or averaging scale ℓ of the system. The modified MOG acceleration law for weak gravitational fields predicts that for the solar system and for the wide binary star systems gravitational dynamics follows Newton's law.

John W. Moffat, "Wide Binaries and Modified Gravity (MOG)" arXiv:2311.17130 (November 28, 2023).

A Newly Discovered Milky Way Satellite Star Cluster

Calling it a satellite galaxy may be something of an overstatement, it is really just a satellite of the Milky Way that is a gravitationally bound star cluster with a mass of 11 to 22 times the Sun.

Simon E. T. Smith, et al., "The discovery of the faintest known Milky Way satellite using UNIONS" arXiv:2311.10147 (November 16, 2023).

Are Sunspots Driven By The Gravitational Pull Of The Planets?

If correct, this hypothesis would be a major paradigm change in our understanding of how the Sun works, although the seeming lack of influence from any of the other planets with significant gravitational pulls on the Sun, relative to the Earth and Jupiter, is suspicious.

The average strength of the gravitational pull of the planets on the Sun, normalized so that Earth's pull on the Sun is equal to one, to three significant digits, is as follows:

* Jupiter 11.7

* Venus 1.56

* Saturn 1.04

* Mercury 0.369

* Mars 0.0463

* Uranus 0.0396

* Neptune 0.0188

* Pluto 0.00000140

Given this, one would expect Venus, Saturn, and Mercury's orbits to have non-negligible effects as well. 

Venus has an almost perfectly circular orbit, so that might explain a lack of a sunspot cycle effect from its gravitational pull, but this is not true of Mercury or Saturn. 

Mercury's 88 day period and strongly elliptical orbit ought to be very measurable in the data as well in this hypothesis even if its small size reduces the magnitude of its impact. 

Saturn's 29.4 year orbit and moderate elliptical orbit also ought to be discernible, but is long enough that the small sample size of Saturn's orbits in a three hundred year old data set whose quality declines in the older data could reduce the statistical significance of this signal.

The sunspot number record covers over three centuries.These numbers measure the activity of the Sun. This activity follows the solar cycle of about eleven years. 

In the dynamo-theory, the interaction between differential rotation and convection produces the solar magnetic field. On the surface of Sun, this field concentrates to the sunspots. The dynamo-theory predicts that the period, the amplitude and the phase of the solar cycle are stochastic. 

Here we show that the solar cycle is deterministic, and connected to the orbital motions of the Earth and Jupiter. This planetary-influence theory allows us to model the whole sunspot record, as well as the near past and the near future of sunspot numbers. We may never be able to predict the exact times of exceptionally strong solar flares, like the catastrophic Carrington event in September 1859, but we can estimate when such events are more probable. Our results also indicate that during the next decades the Sun will no longer help us to cope with the climate change. The inability to find predictability in some phenomenon does not prove that this phenomenon itself is stochastic.

Lauri Jetsu, "Sunspot cycles are connected to the Earth and Jupiter" arXiv:2311.08317 (November 14, 2014).

A 2022 paper includes Venus as well. There is also a 1975 paper purporting to rule out this relationship (and a 2022 paper as well) with a 2022 rebuttal (which is related to the 2022 paper).

Skimming the literature, it does seem that more accurate modeling of the shape of planetary orbits, the actual locations of planets on those orbits, and inclusion of more planets, does produce reasonably good fits to the Sun spot data, although it isn't a conclusive result.

A Nifty New Telescope

The latest Earth based telescope, the ILMT, is pretty cool.

Nestled in the mountains of Northern India, is a 4-metre rotating dish of liquid mercury. Over a 10-year period, the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) will survey 117 square degrees of sky, to study the astrometric and photometric variability of all detected objects. . . .  

Baldeep Grewal, et al., "Survey of Variables with the ILMT" arXiv:2311.05620 (November 8, 2023). 

There is another description of the new telescope at arXiv:2311.05615 which explains the benefits of using a liquid mirror:

A perfect reflective paraboloid represents the ideal reference surface for an optical device to focus a beam of parallel light rays to a single point. This is how astronomical mirrors form images of distant stars in their focal plane. In this context, it is amazing that the surface of a  liquid rotating around a vertical axis takes the shape of a paraboloid under the constant pull of gravity and centrifugal acceleration, the latter growing stronger at distances further from the  central axis. The parabolic surface occurs because a liquid always sets its surface perpendicular to the net acceleration it experiences, which in this case is increasingly tilted and enhanced with distance from the central axis. The focal length F is proportional to the gravity acceleration g and inversely proportional to the square of the angular velocity ω. In the case of the ILMT, the angular velocity ω is about 8 turns per minute, resulting in a focal length of about 8m. Given the action of the optical corrector, the effective focal length f of the D=4m telescope is about 9.44m, resulting in the widely open ratio f/D∼2.4. In the case of the ILMT,  a thin rotating layer of mercury naturally focuses the light from a distant star at its focal point located at ∼8m just above the mirror, with the natural constraint that such a telescope always observes at the zenith. 

Thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the telescope scans a strip of sky centred at a declination equal to the latitude of the observatory (+29◦21′41.4′′ for the ARIES Devasthal observatory). The angular width of the strip is about 22′, a size limited by that of the detector (4k×4k) used in the focal plane of the telescope. Since the ILMT observes the same region of the sky night after night, it is possible either to co-add the images taken on different nights in order to improve the limiting magnitude or to subtract images taken on different nights to make a variability study of the corresponding strip of sky. Consequently, the ILMT is very well-suited to perform variability studies of the strip of sky it observes. While the ILMT mirror is rotating, the linear speed at its rim is about 5.6km/hr, i.e., the speed of a walking person.

A liquid mirror naturally flows to the precise shape paraboloid shape needed because it is a liquid under these conditions. And, since its surface is always dynamically readjusting itself to this shape, rather than being fixed in place just once as a solid mirror would be, any slight imperfections in its surface that do deviate from its paraboloid shape don't stay in exactly the same place. Instead, distortions from slight imperfections in the shape of the liquid mirror average out over multiple observations of the same part of the sky, to an average shape at any one location that is much closer to perfect than a solid mirror cast ultra-precisely just once. Thus, a liquid mirror reduces one subtle source of potential systemic errors that can arise from slight imperfections in the mirror's shape at particular locations that recur every time a particular part of the sky is viewed when a solid mirror is used.

The inauguration of the 4m International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) took place in Devasthalm, Uttarakhand, India on March 21, 2023. The observatory is situated in the Kumaon Himalayas at an altitude of 2450 meters (8,038 feet). 

The coordinates are 29°21′42″N 79°41′06″E, which matter in astronomy, because the latitude impacts which part of the sky it can see.

A New Top Quark Pole Mass Analysis And A Few Wild Conjectures Considered

A new paper makes an re-analysis of existing data to determine the top quark pole mass. It comes up with:

which is consistent with, but at the low end of the range of the Particle Data Group's estimate based upon indirect cross-section measurements (bringing these into the same amount of precision as its direct measurements of the top quark mass):

Recent previous coverage at this blog regarding new top quark mass measurements can be found in a February 7, 2023 post, a November 4, 2022 post and a September 1, 2022 post.

Why Care?

Since this new paper produces cross-section based top quark pole mass estimates that closely confirm direct measurements of top quark pole mass measurements with comparable precision, the fact that both measurements are substantially independent of each other makes our confidence in each of  these measurements greater and makes the best fit measurements produced more robust. It also makes combining results from the two methods statistically to produce a single global best fit measurement with a lower combined uncertainty, incorporating all measurement methods, appear more legitimate and appropriate.

In relative terms, the top quark pole mass is already one of the more precisely known physical constants in the Standard Model. It is more precisely determined in relative terms than the other five quark masses, the three neutrino masses, the four CKM matrix parameters, the four PMNS matrix parameters, and the strong force coupling constant. But, it is less precisely determined in relative terms than the three charged lepton masses, the three fundamental boson masses, the electromagnetic and weak force coupling constants, and Newton's constant.

But, because it is the largest mass which is a fundamental constant of the Standard Model, in absolute terms, the magnitude of the uncertainty in the top quark pole mass is huge. At the Particle Data Group cross-section measurement uncertainty, it is about five times the mass of the pion, and more than the masses of eight of the eleven other fundamental fermion masses in the Standard Model. Only the bottom quark mass, the charm quark mass, and the tau lepton mass are greater than the absolute magnitude in the uncertainty alone in the top quark mass from cross-section measurements.

Also, because the top quark mass is so large, precision in this measurement is important for higher loop adjustments to all sorts of calculations in the Standard Model. 

Relevance To Theory Building

Precision in the top quark mass is also critical for assessing global properties of the Standard Model like a proposed LC&P relationship between the Higgs field vacuum expectation value and the fundamental particle masses in the Standard Model:

The global LC&P relationship (i.e. that the sum of the squares of the fundamental SM particle masses is equal to the square of the Higgs vev, which is equivalent to saying that the sum of the SM particle Yukawas is exactly 1), which is about 0.5% less than the predicted value (2 sigma in top quark and Higgs boson mass, implying a theoretically expected top quark mass of 173,360 MeV and a theoretically expected Higgs boson mass of 125,590 MeV if the adjustments were proportioned to the experimental uncertainty in the LC&P relationship given the current global average measurements, in which about 70% of the uncertainty is from the top quark mass uncertainty and about 29% is from the Higgs boson mass uncertainty). . . . 

But, the LC&P relationship does not hold separately for fermions and bosons, which would be analogous in some ways to supersymmetry. This is only an approximate symmetry. The sum of the squares of the SM fundamental boson masses is more than half of the square of the Higgs vev by about 0.5% (3.5 sigma of Higgs boson mass, implying a theoretically expected Higgs boson mass of about 124,650 MeV), while the sum of the squares of the SM fundamental fermion masses is less than half of the square of the Higgs vev by about 1.5% (about 2.8 sigma of top quark mass, implying a theoretically expected top quark mass of about 173,610 MeV). The combined deviation from the LC&P relationship for both fermions and bosons independently is 4.5 sigma, which is a very strong tensions that is nearly conclusively ruled out. One wonders if the slightly bosonic leaning deviation from this symmetry between fundamental fermion masses and fundamental boson masses has some deeper meaning or source.

The result in this new paper, by largely corroborating direct measurements of the top quark mass at similar levels of precision, continues to favor a lower top quark mass than the one favored by LP&C expectations. 

Earlier, lower energy Tevatron measurements of the top quark mass (where the top quark was discovered) supported higher values for the top quark mass than the combined data from either of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments do and was closely in line with the LP&C expectation. 

But there is no good reason to think that both of the LHC experiments measuring the top quark mass have greatly understated the systemic uncertainties in their measurements (which combine measurements from multiple channels with overlapping but not identical sources of systemic uncertainty). Certainly, the LHC experiments have much larger numbers of top quark events to work with than the two Tevatron experiments measuring the top quark mass did, so the relatively low statistical uncertainties of the LHC measurements of the top quark mass are undeniably something that makes their measurements more precise relative to Tevatron.

Could This Hint At Missing Fundamental Particles?

If I were a phenomenologist prone to proposing new particles, I'd say that this close but not quite right fit to the LP&C hypothesis was a theoretical hint that the Standard Model might be missing one or more fundamental particles, probably fermions (which deviate most strongly from the expected values).

I'll explore some of those possibilities, because readers might find them to be interesting. But, to be clear, I am not prone to proposing new particles, indeed, my inclinations are quite the opposite. I don't actually think that any of these proposals is very well motivated.

In part, this is because I think that dark matter phenomena and dark energy phenomena are very likely to be gravitational issues rather than due to dark matter particles or dark energy bosonic scalar fields, I don't think we need need particles to serve that purpose. Dark matter phenomena would otherwise be the strong motivator for a beyond the Standard Model new fundamental particle. 

I am being lenient in not pressing some of the more involved arguments from the data and theoretical structure of fundamental physics that argue against the existence of many of these proposed beyond the Standard Model fundamental particles. 

This is so, even though the LP&C hypothesis is beautiful, plausible, and quite close to the experimental data, so it would be great to be able to salvage it somehow if the top quark mass and Higgs boson mass end up being close to or lower than their current best fit estimated values.

Beyond The Standard Model Fundamental Fermion Candidates

If the missing fermion were a singlet, LP&C would imply an upper bound on its mass of about 3 GeV. 

This could be a good fit for a singlet sterile neutrino that gets its mass via the Higgs mechanism and then transfers its own mass to the three active neutrinos via a see-saw mechanism. 

It could also be a good fit for a singlet spin-3/2 gravitino in a supersymmetry inspired model in which only the graviton, and not the ordinary Standard Model fermions and bosons have superpartners.

A largely sterile singlet gravitino, and a singlet sterile neutrino, have both been proposed as cold dark matter candidates and at masses under 3 GeV the bounds on their cross-sections of interaction (so that they could have some self-interaction or weak to feeble interaction with ordinary matter since purely sterile dark matter that only interacts via gravity isn't a good fit for the astronomy data) aren't as tightly constrained as heavier WIMP candidates. And, the constraints on a WIMP dark matter particle cross section of interaction from direct dark matter detection experiments gets even weaker fairly rapidly between 3 GeV and 1 GeV, which is what the LP&C conjecture would hint at if either the current best fit value for the top quark mass or the current best fit value for the Higgs boson mass were a bit light.

The LP&C conjecture isn't a useful hint towards (or against) a massive graviton, however, because the experimental bounds on those are on the order of 32 orders of magnitude or more too small to be discernible by that means.

If there were three generations of missing fermions, you'd expect them to have masses about two-thirds higher than the charged lepton masses, with the most massive one still close to 3 GeV, the second generation one at about 176 MeV, and the first generation one at about 0.8 MeV. But these masses could be smaller if the best fit values for the top quark mass and/or Higgs boson mass ended rising somewhat as the uncertainties in those measurements fall.

These masses for a missing fermion triplet might fit a leptoquark model of the kind that has been proposed to explain B meson decay anomalies. The experimental motivation for leptoquarks was stronger before the experimental data supporting violations of the Standard Model principle of charged lepton universality (i.e. that the three charged leptons have precisely the same properties except their masses) evaporated in the face of factors in the data analysis of the seemingly anomalous experimental results from B meson decays. But there are still some lesser and subtle anomalies in B meson decays that didn't go away with this improved data analysis that could motivate similar leptoquark models.

If there were two missing fermions of similar masses (or two missing fermion triplets with their sum of square masses dominated by the third-generation particle of each triplet), this would suggest a missing fundamental particle mass on the order of up to about 2 GeV each.

A model with two missing fermion triplets might make sense if there were two columns of missing leptoquarks, instead of one, just as there are two columns of quarks (up type and down type) and two columns of leptons (charged leptons and neutrinos), in the Standard Model.

Beyond The Standard Model Fundamental Boson Candidates

If the Standard Model fermions are a complete set, and the LP&C conjecture is correct, then we'd be looking for one or more beyond the Standard Model massive fundamental bosons with masses of less than 3 GeV for a singlet, less than about 2 GeV for two similar mass missing bosons, and masses of less than about 1.73 GeV (a tad less than the tau lepton mass) for three similar mass massing bosons.

Probably the most plausible well-explored proposed beyond the Standard Model particle for missing fundamental bosons in this mass range would be an additional electromagnetically neutral Higgs boson in a two Higgs doublet model - either a scalar light Higgs boson "h" (as opposed to a Standard Model heavier scalar Higgs boson "H"), or a pseudoscalar Higgs boson "A", or both. The problem with a two Higgs doublet models, though, is that it fives us four new massive fundamental bosons, even though we only need one to respond to the LP&C hint.

At least one of the two new electromagnetically neutral extra Higgs bosons in a two Higgs doublet model could be short lived and give rise to the neutrino masses, in lieu of existing see-saw models or Majorana mass models for neutrino mass. A mass in the range of perhaps 0.1-3 GeV, more or less, could serve this purpose and we might expect a boson that gives rise to neutrino masses to be significantly smaller than the Standard Model Higgs boson that gives rise to order of magnitude larger quark and charged lepton masses.

Another of these extra Higgs bosons could be stable or be created and destroyed at precisely the same rates, have only weak or feeble interactions with Standard Model particles, and could provide a dark bosonic dark matter candidate, which in  the face of indications that dark matter seems to be more wave-like than particle-like, might be a better fit to the astronomy data than a WIMP.  If the dark matter candidate extra Higgs boson were less massive than the least massive neutrino mass eigenstate (i.e. probably less than 1 meV and perhaps much less), its stability could be explained because it couldn't decay into anything else, since there were no massive particles less massive than it.

The biggest problem with using particles from a two Higgs doublet paradigm to reconcile the shortfall of fundamental particle masses suggested by the LP&C conjecture, however, is that it would imply in a fairly vanilla two Higgs double model, a positively charged and negatively charged Higgs boson (H+ and H-) of identical masses, something which can be pretty definitively ruled out for the masses of up to 1.73 GeV to 2 GeV that the LP&C conjecture could support.

The Particle Data Group notes that charged Higgs bosons have been ruled out for masses of less than 80 GeV (more like 155 GeV if you look at the underlying studies referenced through the year 2015) and for masses between the top quark mass and about 1,103 GeV (looking at studies through 2018). And a number of new results from the LHC since the Particle Data Group values were last updated make that exclusion even stronger. 

There is really no plausible way that particle physicists could have missed an electromagnetically charged fundamental particle (either a fermion or a boson) in the 0.1 GeV (about the same as the muon and strange quark) to 3 GeV (between the tau lepton and charm quark on one hand and the bottom quark on the other) mass range suggested by the LP&C conjecture and current data, even if it was produced very infrequently, in very rare processes that interact at all with any Standard Model particles non-gravitationally. Particle collider particle detectors are exquisitely sensitive to electromagnetically charged particles in that mass range, no matter how short-lived they may be (and stable charged fundamental particles in that mass window would be found, if not in colliders, by other means).

Of course, as a theoretical physicists proposing beyond the Standard Model physics, you can propose any new particles that you like and need not constrain yourself to well-explored proposals like a two Higgs doublet model if you don't want to do so.

Given those constraints, a singlet electromagnetically neutral neutrino mass imparting boson analogous to the Higgs boson for other fundamental Standard Model particles, outside of the two Higgs doublet model, might be a better candidate for a new fundamental boson that fills out the missing fundamental particle mass suggested by the LP&C conjecture. The source of neutrino mass is still an unsolved problem, so that provides at least some motivation for it. 

If this fundamental boson was stable, or produced and destroyed at strictly identical rates, it could also be a dark matter candidate, solving two issues with on BSM particle.

The LP&C conjecture provides no hint for or against a 17 MeV missing fundamental boson, which has been proposed by a single experiment to explain some subtle decay angle issues in nuclear physics, because 17 MeV squared in only about 0.1% of the uncertainty in the sum of the square of the fundamental particle masses, so the existence or non-existence of such a particle would be impossible to determine for the foreseeable future using the LP&C conjecture if it were true. 

Beyond The Standard Model Fundamental Fermion And Boson Set Candidates

Self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) models generally propose one predominant stable, electromagnetically neutral, fermionic dark matter candidate (possibly part of a three generation fermion triplet with more massive but unstable second and third generation counterparts), and one unstable, electromagnetically neutral, bosonic "dark photon" that carries a self-interaction force between dark matter fermions.

Since the mass of an unstable boson is functionally related to the range of the force it carries, which can be estimated from the inferred dynamics of fermionic dark matter particles in SIDM models, we can estimate that the sweet spot in terms of mass for a dark photon that carries the self-interaction force between dark matter fermion particles is about 100 MeV.

If both the dark matter fermion and the dark photon receive their masses via a Standard Model Higgs mechanism, then a dark matter fermion in the 0.1 GeV to 3 GeV range as suggested by the LP&C conjecture with the exact mass ultimately determined masses of the top quark and Higgs boson demand. And, if one had a dark matter fermion triplet, the third-generation unstable dark matter fermion could be at the high end of this mass range, the second-generation unstable dark matter fermion could be in the low hundreds of MeV in mass, and the lightest and stable dark matter fermion could have a mass as small as necessary to fit the astronomy data (e.g. in the keV warm dark matter range, or even in the axion-like very low dark matter particle range).

These four new missing fundamental particles could fit a self-interacting warm dark matter model, fill the LP&C conjecture mass gap, would have no non-Higgs portal interactions with Standard Model particles, and as fairly light, electromagnetically neutral particles with no weak or strong force interactions, that decay to other electromagnetically neutral particles with no weak or strong force interactions, could have escaped detection as a Higgs boson decay channel so far at particle colliders, manifesting merely as missing traverse momentum in Higgs boson decays at levels that can't be ruled out yet.

While neither warm dark matter models, nor self-interacting dark matter models have proven very satisfactory in matching the astronomy data (although each of them do at least marginally better than collisionless cold dark matter models with GeV mass particles do), perhaps combining both of these cold dark matter particle model variants would work better than a model with one rather than both of these features.

More On Wide Binaries, MOND and Deur

A new study concludes very emphatically that wide binary stars behave in a manner more like Newtonian dynamics and less like MOND. This seems pretty definitive, but we've seen contradictory conclusions on the wide binary data before, so I don't consider this to be the final word.

More importantly, it doesn't rule out all gravity based explanations of dark matter phenomena. In particular, Deur's gravitational self-interaction driven approach explains dark matter phenomena with a gravitational solution (with no dark matter or dark energy) over a very wide range of applicability and does not predict significantly non-Newtonian behavior in wide binaries. 

Deur's approach may or may not be consistent with consideration of non-perturbative standard general relativistic effects as claimed. But whether Deur is applying general relativity in an unconventional way that rigorously considers a feature of general relativity that most other researchers neglect, or is actually a subtle gravity modification theory that isn't quite identical to standard general relativity, it works. Deur's approach also roots MOND-like galaxy behavior, and really all dark matter and dark energy theories in a theory that has a fairly simple deep theoretical motivation rather than just being a phenomenological fit to some key data points. And, unlike LambdaCDM and other standard dark energy theories, Deur's approach does so without globally violating conservation of mass-energy.

Deur's approach explains dark matter phenomena not just where MOND works, but also in many circumstances where MOND does not work. 

For example, Deur's approach works in galaxy clusters, in the Bullet cluster, with respect to wide binary star systems, as an explanation for different degrees of dark matter phenomena in differently shaped elliptical galaxies, as an explanation for the two-dimensional arrangement of satellite galaxies around spiral galaxies, and as an explanation for dark energy phenomena as well. It even provides a potential explanation for the Hubble constant tension and can reproduce the cosmic microwave background observed by the Planck collaboration and the early galaxy formation observed by the Webb telescope.

If the conclusion of this paper holds up, it somewhat decisively tips the balance between Deur's approach and other gravitational explanations of dark matter phenomena.

We test Milgromian dynamics (MOND) using wide binary stars (WBs) with separations of 2−30 kAU. Locally, the WB orbital velocity in MOND should exceed the Newtonian prediction by ≈20% at asymptotically large separations given the Galactic external field effect (EFE). 

We investigate this with a detailed statistical analysis of Gaia DR3 data on 8611 WBs within 250 pc of the Sun. Orbits are integrated in a rigorously calculated gravitational field that directly includes the EFE. We also allow line of sight contamination and undetected close binary companions to the stars in each WB. We interpolate between the Newtonian and Milgromian predictions using the parameter αgrav, with 0 indicating Newtonian gravity and 1 indicating MOND. 

Directly comparing the best Newtonian and Milgromian models reveals that Newtonian dynamics is preferred at 19σ confidence. Using a complementary Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis, we find that αgrav=−0.021+0.065−0.045, which is fully consistent with Newtonian gravity but excludes MOND at 16σ confidence. This is in line with the similar result of Pittordis and Sutherland using a somewhat different sample selection and less thoroughly explored population model. 

We show that although our best-fitting model does not fully reproduce the observations, an overwhelmingly strong preference for Newtonian gravity remains in a considerable range of variations to our analysis. 

Adapting the MOND interpolating function to explain this result would cause tension with rotation curve constraints. We discuss the broader implications of our results in light of other works, concluding that MOND must be substantially modified on small scales to account for local WBs.

Indranil Banik, "Strong constraints on the gravitational law from Gaia DR3 wide binaries" arXiv:2311.03436 (November 6, 2023).

In other dark matter news, fuzzy dark matter theories (a very light boson with wave-like behavior dark matter theory) are compared to cold dark matter theories (with which all sorts of empirical evidence is inconsistent).

As I've noted often, but articulated less often, models with very light dark matter particles (especially bosonic ones) look a lot like quantum gravity theories with a graviton that has zero mass but non-zero mass-energy and self-interaction. Many axion-like dark matter theories, like fuzzy dark matter theories, lean towards this description. So, we are gradually starting to see dark matter theories converge on a mechanism that bears great similarities to a gravity based explanation of dark matter phenomena.

Finally, this paper is interesting:

The immense diversity of the galaxy population in the universe is believed to stem from their disparate merging histories, stochastic star formations, and multi-scale influences of filamentary environments. Any single initial condition of the early universe was never expected to explain alone how the galaxies formed and evolved to end up possessing such various traits as they have at the present epoch. However, several observational studies have revealed that the key physical properties of the observed galaxies in the local universe appeared to be regulated by one single factor, the identity of which has been shrouded in mystery up to date. 

Here, we report on our success of identifying the single regulating factor as the degree of misalignments between the initial tidal field and protogalaxy inertia momentum tensors. The spin parameters, formation epochs, stellar-to-total mass ratios, stellar ages, sizes, colors, metallicities and specific heat energies of the galaxies from the IllustrisTNG suite of hydrodynamic simulations are all found to be almost linearly and strongly dependent on this initial condition, when the differences in galaxy total mass, environmental density and shear are controlled to vanish. The cosmological predispositions, if properly identified, turns out to be much more impactful on galaxy evolution than conventionally thought.

Jun-Sung Moon, Jounghun Lee, "Why Galaxies are Indeed Simpler than Expected" arXiv:2311.03632 (November 7, 2023).

Scientific Conference Shenanigans

The Pre-Columbian Pacific Coast

Here's a map of more than 6000 contact-era Native American Villages on the West Coast that were recorded from written accounts or oral traditions. 

A Global Map Of The Last Glacial Maximum (And Dingos)

The Last Glacial Maximum land bridge in Southeast Asia (ca. 18,000-20,000 years ago) was not the source of dingos in Australia, although this land bridge may have facilitated the migration of modern humans who led to the extinction of relict archaic hominins to the west of the Wallace Line in what is now island Southeast Asia.

The Sahul Shelf and the Sunda Shelf during the past 12,000 years: Tasmania separated from the mainland 12,000 ybp, and New Guinea separated from the mainland 6,500–8,500 ybp.

It also turns out that recent discoveries have estimated that the arrival of the dingo (Australia's native dogs) in Australia may have been much more recently than previously estimated, since the oldest dingo remains in Australia were previously misdated. The current dates are consistent with an arrival of dingos in Australia via Austronesian mariners. Wikipedia explains that:

The earliest known dingo remains, found in Western Australia, date to 3,450 years ago. Based on a comparison of modern dingoes with these early remains, dingo morphology has not changed over thousands of years. This suggests that no artificial selection has been applied over this period and that the dingo represents an early form of dog. They have lived, bred, and undergone natural selection in the wild, isolated from other dogs until the arrival of European settlers, resulting in a unique breed.

In 2020, an MDNA study of ancient dog remains from the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins of southern China showed that most of the ancient dogs fell within haplogroup A1b, as do the Australian dingoes and the pre-colonial dogs of the Pacific, but in low frequency in China today. The specimen from the Tianluoshan archaeological site, Zhejiang province dates to 7,000 YBP (years before present) and is basal to the entire haplogroup A1b lineage. The dogs belonging to this haplogroup were once widely distributed in southern China, then dispersed through Southeast Asia into New Guinea and Oceania, but were replaced in China by dogs of other lineages 2,000 YBP.

The oldest reliable date for dog remains found in mainland Southeast Asia is from Vietnam at 4,000 YBP, and in Island Southeast Asia from Timor-Leste at 3,000 YBP. In New Guinea, the earliest dog remains date to 2,500–2,300 YBP from Caution Bay near Port Moresby, but no ancient New Guinea singing dog remains have been found. The earliest dingo remains in the Torres Straits date to 2,100 YBP. 

The earliest dingo skeletal remains in Australia are estimated at 3,450 YBP from the Mandura Caves on the Nullarbor Plain, south-eastern Western Australia; 3,320 YBP from Woombah Midden near Woombah, New South Wales; and 3,170 YBP from Fromme's Landing on the Murray River near Mannum, South Australia. 

Dingo bone fragments were found in a rock shelter located at Mount Burr, South Australia, in a layer that was originally dated 7,000-8,500 YBP. Excavations later indicated that the levels had been disturbed, and the dingo remains "probably moved to an earlier level." 

The dating of these early Australian dingo fossils led to the widely held belief that dingoes first arrived in Australia 4,000 YBP and then took 500 years to disperse around the continent. However, the timing of these skeletal remains was based on the dating of the sediments in which they were discovered, and not the specimens themselves.

In 2018, the oldest skeletal bones from the Madura Caves were directly carbon dated between 3,348 and 3,081 YBP, providing firm evidence of the earliest dingo and that dingoes arrived later than had previously been proposed. The next-most reliable timing is based on desiccated flesh dated 2,200 YBP from Thylacine Hole, 110 km west of Eucla on the Nullarbor Plain, southeastern Western Australia. When dingoes first arrived, they would have been taken up by indigenous Australians, who then provided a network for their swift transfer around the continent. Based on the recorded distribution time for dogs across Tasmania and cats across Australia once indigenous Australians had acquired them, the dispersal of dingoes from their point of landing until they occupied continental Australia is proposed to have taken only 70 years. The red fox is estimated to have dispersed across the continent in only 60–80 years.

At the end of the last glacial maximum and the associated rise in sea levels, Tasmania became separated from the Australian mainland 12,000 YBP, and New Guinea 6,500–8,500 YBP by the inundation of the Sahul Shelf. Fossil remains in Australia date to around 3,500 YBP and no dingo remains have been uncovered in Tasmania, so the dingo is estimated to have arrived in Australia at a time between 3,500 and 12,000 YBP. To reach Australia through Island Southeast Asia even at the lowest sea level of the last glacial maximum, a journey of at least 50 kilometres (31 mi) over open sea between ancient Sunda and Sahul was necessary, so they must have accompanied humans on boats.

Some best estimates of Austronesian migration are as follows:

Suggested early migration route of early Austronesians into and out of Taiwan based on ancient and modern mtDNA data. This hypothesis assumes the Sino-Austronesian grouping, a minority view among linguists. (Ko et al., 2014).

Map showing the migration of the Austronesians from Taiwan. Indonesia is reached ca. 3500 years BP, and Papua New Guinea is reached ca. 3300 years BP.

There is no direct evidence of the involvement of Austronesian mariners bringing dingos to Australia, but they were the only sea faring people in the region at the time who could have made the trip beyond the line of sight over deep waters in that era, were engaged in seafaring in the region at just about the right time, had ties to Southern China where dingos probably originated, and dingos pretty much had to have arrived in Australia with people by boat, as opposed to without human intervention. 

The timing and location of the earliest Australian dingo remains also suggests an introduction from someplace in Indonesia to someplace west of Cape York in Australia, rather than from Papua New Guinea to Cape York, which would have involved the shortest overwater journey. This was a trip well within the maritime capabilities of the Austronesians of 3500 BP to 3300 BP.

An Old Specimen Of Homo Erectus

A new Homo Erectus specimen from Ethiopia confirms that this species of archaic hominin arose about 2 million years ago in Africa. This species went extinct around 100,000 years ago.

With new paleomagnetic dating results and some description of recently excavated material, Mussi and coworkers show that levels D, E, and F are between 2.02 million and 1.95 million years old. Most interesting is that level D includes what is now the earliest Acheulean assemblage in the world, and level E has produced the partial jaw of a very young Homo erectus individual. The Garba IVE jaw is now one of two earliest H. erectus individuals known anywhere, in a virtual tie with the DNH 134 cranial vault from Drimolen, South Africa.

From John Hawks.

Modern Human Introgression Into Neanderthal DNA

Altai Neanderthals had significant (6%) modern human admixture from admixture events as much as 250,000 years ago (at the very dawn of the modern human species). Thus, gene flow went both ways between Neanderthals and modern humans. These genes mostly reduced the selective fitness of the hybrid Neanderthals.

Neanderthal admixture in sub-Saharan Africans, meanwhile, is due to Eurasian back migration to Africa.

Highlights 

• Anatomically modern human-to-Neanderthal introgression occurred ∼250,000 years ago

• ∼6% of the Altai Neanderthal genome was inherited from anatomically modern humans

• Recent non-African admixture brought Neanderthal ancestry to some African groups

• Modern human alleles were deleterious to Neanderthals

Summary

Comparisons of Neanderthal genomes to anatomically modern human (AMH) genomes show a history of Neanderthal-to-AMH introgression stemming from interbreeding after the migration of AMHs from Africa to Eurasia. 

All non-sub-Saharan African AMHs have genomic regions genetically similar to Neanderthals that descend from this introgression. Regions of the genome with Neanderthal similarities have also been identified in sub-Saharan African populations, but their origins have been unclear. 

To better understand how these regions are distributed across sub-Saharan Africa, the source of their origin, and what their distribution within the genome tells us about early AMH and Neanderthal evolution, we analyzed a dataset of high-coverage, whole-genome sequences from 180 individuals from 12 diverse sub-Saharan African populations. 

In sub-Saharan African populations with non-sub-Saharan African ancestry, as much as 1% of their genomes can be attributed to Neanderthal sequence introduced by recent migration, and subsequent admixture, of AMH populations originating from the Levant and North Africa. 

However, most Neanderthal homologous regions in sub-Saharan African populations originate from migration of AMH populations from Africa to Eurasia ∼250 kya, and subsequent admixture with Neanderthals, resulting in ∼6% AMH ancestry in Neanderthals. These results indicate that there have been multiple migration events of AMHs out of Africa and that Neanderthal and AMH gene flow has been bi-directional. 

Observing that genomic regions where AMHs show a depletion of Neanderthal introgression are also regions where Neanderthal genomes show a depletion of AMH introgression points to deleterious interactions between introgressed variants and background genomes in both groups—a hallmark of incipient speciation.

Daniel N. Harris, et al., "Diverse African genomes reveal selection on ancient modern human introgressions in Neanderthals" Current Biology (October 13, 2023). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.066

A popular media discussion of the paper explains that:

[T]hey compared the modern human genomes to a genome belonging to a Neanderthal who lived approximately 120,000 years ago. For this comparison, the team developed a novel statistical method that allowed them to determine the origins of the Neanderthal-like DNA in these modern sub-Saharan populations, whether they were regions that Neanderthals inherited from modern humans or regions that modern humans inherited from Neanderthals and then brought back to Africa.

They found that all of the sub-Saharan populations contained Neanderthal-like DNA, indicating that this phenomenon is widespread. In most cases, this Neanderthal-like DNA originated from an ancient lineage of modern humans that passed their DNA on to Neanderthals when they migrated from Africa to Eurasia around 250,000 years ago. As a result of this modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, approximately 6% of the Neanderthal genome was inherited from modern humans.

In some specific sub-Saharan populations, the researchers also found evidence of Neanderthal ancestry that was introduced to these populations when humans bearing Neanderthal genes migrated back into Africa. Neanderthal ancestry in these sub-Saharan populations ranged from 0 to 1.5%, and the highest levels were observed in the Amhara from Ethiopia and Fulani from Cameroon.

Columbus Day Considered

Christopher Columbus was a pretty horrible person, so I have no problem ceasing to honor him with a national holiday. But he was also a uniquely important historical person whom everyone should know about, and the well attested date of his arrival, in 1492 CE, should also be something that every educated person knows.

Columbus was not the first person to make contact with the Americas after the arrival and dispersal of the predominant Founding populations of the indigenous people of South America, Mesoamerica, and most of North America around 14,000 years ago from Beringia where these populations had an extended sojourn in their migration to the Americas from Northeast Asia. They arrived with dogs, but no other domesticated animals.

There was at least one small progenitor wave of modern humans that reached at least as far as New Mexico before them about 21,000 or more years ago (as recent research has confirmed this year from earlier less definitive data), but unlike the Founding population of the Americas (itself derived from a genetically homogeneous population of less than a thousand Beringians), they left few traces and had little, if any, demographic impact on the Founding population that came after them, or had only the most minimal, if any, ecological impact on the Americas. 

Columbus also arrived after the later arrival of two waves of migration from Siberia, one of which brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene people during what was the Bronze Age in Europe, and the second of which brought the ancestors of the Inuits during the European Middle Ages, both of whom were mostly limited to the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America, except for a Na-Dene migration to what is now the American Southwest around 1000 CE plus or minus (in part from pressure to move caused by the ancestors of the Inuit people). The Na-Dene ultimately heavily integrated themselves into the local population descended from the Founding population of the Americas. The Inuits admixed some, but much less, with the pre-existing population of the North American Arctic and largely replaced a population of "Paleo-Eskimos" who derived from the same wave of ancestors as the Na-Dene in the North American Arctic.

A few villages of Vikings settled for a generation or two in what is now Eastern Canada ca. 1000 CE before dying out or leaving (and leaving almost no genetic trace in people who continued to live in the Americas). And, the Polynesians (and perhaps others) probably made contact with the Pacific Coast of South America and Central America several times in the time frame (generously estimated) of ca. 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, again without a huge impact on the Americas or the rest of the world and with only slight amounts of admixture.

But the contact that Christopher Columbus made with the Americas persisted and profoundly changed both the Americas and the rest of the world. He returned to Europe and then came back with more Europeans who aimed to conquer the New World (including many covert Sephardic Jews seeking a more hospitable future than they had in Iberia). 

Christopher Columbus's first contact led to a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of perhaps 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas (mostly due to the spread of European diseases like small pox and E. Coli, to which the people of the Americas had no immunity, at a time prior to the germ theory of disease, and only secondarily due to more concerted hostile actions taken by the European colonists towards the indigenous populations), led to the collapse of the Aztec and Inca civilizations at the hands of Spanish Conquistadors, brought syphilis to the Old World (especially Europe), brought horses to the Americas, led to the deforestation of much of North America, and brought crops native to the Americas including potatoes, maize, tomatoes, and hot chilis to the Old World (both Europe and Asia). Indirectly, this chain of events even led fairly directly to the Irish potato famine more than three centuries later.

His arrival started the chain of events that caused Spanish and Portuguese to become the dominant languages of South American, Central America, Mexico, and much of the Caribbean, in heavily admixed populations with mostly Iberian European male ancestry, and caused what became the United States and Canada to become mostly English and French speaking, where a policy of population replacement became the norm. Thousands of indigenous languages went extinct in this process. All but a few hundred of the rest of are now moribund or nearly so an declining. Those few hundred indigenous American languages that do survive are mostly minor secondary languages in their homelands now: only thirty-five have more than 100,000 speakers and just six have more than 1,000,000 speakers. 

In the U.S., Canada, and Greenland, the twelve most widely spoken are Navajo in the U.S. with about 170,000 speakers, followed by Cree in Canada with 96,000 speakers, Kalaallisut in Greenland with 57,000 speakers, Ojibwe in the U.S. and Canada with 48,000 speakers, Inuktituk in Canada with 39,475 speakers, Blackfoot in the U.S. and Canada with 34,394 speakers, Sioux in the United States with 25,000 speakers, O'odham in the U.S. and Mexico with 23,313 speakers, Yup'ik in the U.S. with 18,626 speakers, Western Apache in the U.S. with 14,012 speakers, Keresan in the U.S. with 13,073 speakers, and Chipewyan in the Canada with 11,325 speakers. Twenty-one more indigenous languages in this region have more than 1,000 speakers but less than 10,000. All twenty-three of the indigenous languages of the Americas with more speakers than Navajo are spoken outside this region (i.e., in Latin America).

But for Christopher Columbus's initiative to mount his expedition, similar events would have taken place eventually, anyway, but they might have taken place decades or even a century later in global history in different ways. A North America colonized along the Iberian model, for example, as much of the Western United States was at first, could have led to a very different human geography than what we see today. The eventual first lasting Old World contact might have even happened in a Trans-Pacific voyage from Asia, instead of across the Atlantic Ocean.

Linguistic Terminology

One of the big issues in classification, mostly a terminology question, is where to draw the line between two ways of speaking and writing being dialects v. different languages, in part, because it often has political connotations.

"language" has two meanings: a generalized, abstract sense that comprises all human speech and writing, and the officially recognized speech and writing of a nation / country / gens — a politically united group of people.

A topolect is the speech / writing of the people living in a certain place or area. It is geographically determined.

A dialect is a distinctive form / style / pronunciation / accent shared by two or more people. To qualify as the speaker of a particular dialect, one must possess a pattern of speech, a lect, that is intelligible to others who speak the same dialect. As we say in Mandarin, it's a question of whether what you speak is jiǎng dé tōng 講得通 ("mutually intelligible") or jiǎng bùtōng 講不通 ("mutually unintelligible"). If what two people are speaking is jiǎng bùtōng 講不通 ("mutually unintelligible"), then they're not speaking the same dialect.

Naturally, the dividing line between one dialect and another is not sharp. There is a blending, a gradation, a blurring between them. The same if true of languages on a larger scale. For example, I can understand close to a 100% of the speech of natives of Stark County, Ohio, but maybe only 75-80% of rapid speech from Vinton County in the south.

An idiolect is spoken by only one person. . . .

"Dialect" means so many radically different things, but also so many things that somewhat resemble each other, but are not really the same, that it is essentially useless for scientific purposes.

From Language Log.

Antimatter Falls Down

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but experiments have now confirmed, at the ALPHA Experiment at CERN, that anti-matter does indeed fall down, which is to say that its mass-energy has the same gravitational "charge" as all other mass-energy, rather than "falling up" and having a repulsive gravitational reaction to ordinary mass-energy. A link to the peer reviewed paper in Nature, and it abstract can be found here. The abstract states:

Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GR), from 1915, remains the most successful description of gravitation. From the 1919 solar eclipse to the observation of gravitational waves, the theory has passed many crucial experimental tests. However, the evolving concepts of dark matter and dark energy illustrate that there is much to be learned about the gravitating content of the universe. Singularities in the GR theory and the lack of a quantum theory of gravity suggest that our picture is incomplete. It is thus prudent to explore gravity in exotic physical systems. Antimatter was unknown to Einstein in 1915. Dirac’s theory appeared in 1928; the positron was observed in 1932. There has since been much speculation about gravity and antimatter. The theoretical consensus is that any laboratory mass must be attracted by the Earth, although some authors have considered the cosmological consequences if antimatter should be repelled by matter. In GR, the Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) requires that all masses react identically to gravity, independent of their internal structure. Here we show that antihydrogen atoms, released from magnetic confinement in the ALPHA-g apparatus, behave in a way consistent with gravitational attraction to the Earth. Repulsive ‘antigravity’ is ruled out in this case. This experiment paves the way for precision studies of the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration between anti-atoms and the Earth to test the WEP.

The WEP has recently been tested for matter in Earth orbit with a precision of order 10-15. Antimatter has hitherto resisted direct, ballistic tests of the WEP due to the lack of a stable, electrically neutral, test particle. Electromagnetic forces on charged antiparticles make direct measurements in the Earth’s gravitational field extremely challenging . The gravitational force on a proton at the Earth’s surface is equivalent to that from an electric field of about 10-7 Vm-1. The situation with magnetic fields is even more dire: a cryogenic antiproton at 10 K would experience gravity-level forces in a magnetic field of order 10-10 T. Controlling stray fields to this level to unmask gravity is daunting. Experiments have, however, shown that confined, oscillating, charged antimatter particles behave as expected when considered as clocks in a gravitational field. The abilities to produce and confine antihydrogen now allow us to employ stable, neutral anti-atoms in dynamic experiments where gravity should play a role. Early considerations and a more recent proof-of-principle experiment in 2013 illustrated this potential. We describe here the initial results of a purpose-built experiment designed to observe the direction and the magnitude of the gravitational force on neutral antimatter.

This Year's Nobel Prize In Physics

The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created a ground-breaking technique using lasers to understand the extremely rapid movements of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy,” the Nobel committee said when the prize was announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

From CNN.

Usually, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to someone who made a major theoretical advance. This year, however, the prize went to winners who developed a new experimental measurement technique.

This is fair. Experimentalists deserve their day in the sun and are absolutely critical to scientific advances in physics which are often under appreciated.

I wonder, however, if this choice doesn't also reflect ambivalence about which paths in the theoretical development of physics by physicists who are still alive and haven't yet received the prize, will turn out to be the right ones.