Wednesday, September 30, 2020

About General Relativity And Missing Mass

Not new, but brought to my attention by a Physics Forums Insights article. (See also, this related Physics Form post on these articles).

[Submitted on 21 Sep 2015 (v1), last revised 24 Oct 2017 (this version, v5)]

The Missing Mass Problem as a Manifestation of GR Contextuality

In Newtonian gravity, mass is an intrinsic property of matter while in general relativity (GR), mass is a contextual property of matter, i.e., matter can simultaneously possess two different values of mass when it is responsible for two different spatiotemporal geometries. Herein, we explore the possibility that the astrophysical missing mass attributed to non-baryonic dark matter (DM) actually obtains because we have been assuming the Newtonian view of mass rather than the GR view. Since an exact GR solution for realistic astrophysical situations is not feasible, we explore GR-motivated ansatzes relating proper mass and dynamic mass for one and the same baryonic matter, as justified by GR contextuality. We consider four GR alternatives and find that the GR ansatz motivated by metric perturbation theory works well in fitting galactic rotation curves (THINGS data), the mass profiles of X-ray clusters (ROSAT and ASCA data) and the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB, Planck 2015 data) without DM. We compare our galactic rotation curve fits to modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), Burkett halo DM and Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) halo DM. We compare our X-ray cluster mass profile fits to metric skew-tensor gravity (MSTG) and core-modified NFW DM. We compare our CMB angular power spectrum fit to scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG) and ΛCDM. Overall, we find our fits to be comparable to those of MOND, MSTG, STVG, ΛCDM, Burkett, and NFW. We present and discuss correlations and trends for the best fit values of our fitting parameters. For the most part, the correlations are consistent with well-established results at all scales, which is perhaps surprising given the simple functional form of the GR ansatz.
Comments:18 pages text. Twice revised per referee/reviewer comments. Fit of CMB angular power spectrum and dark matter halo fits added
Subjects:General Physics (physics.gen-ph)
Journal reference:International Journal of Modern Physics D 27, No. 14, 1847018 (2018)
DOI:10.1142/S0218271818470181
Cite as:arXiv:1509.09288 [physics.gen-ph]
 (or arXiv:1509.09288v5 [physics.gen-ph] for this version)
There is another overlapping version:

End of a Dark Age?

We argue that dark matter and dark energy phenomena associated with galactic rotation curves, X-ray cluster mass profiles, and type Ia supernova data can be accounted for via small corrections to idealized general relativistic spacetime geometries due to disordered locality. Accordingly, we fit THINGS rotation curve data rivaling modified Newtonian dynamics, ROSAT/ASCA X-ray cluster mass profile data rivaling metric-skew-tensor gravity, and SCP Union2.1 SN Ia data rivaling ΛCDM without non-baryonic dark matter or a cosmological constant. In the case of dark matter, we geometrically modify proper mass interior to the Schwarzschild solution. In the case of dark energy, we modify proper distance in Einstein-deSitter cosmology. Therefore, the phenomena of dark matter and dark energy may be chimeras created by an errant belief that spacetime is a differentiable manifold rather than a disordered graph.
Comments:This version was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics D; revised version of an essay that won Honorable Mention in the Gravity Research Foundation 2016 Awards for Essays on Gravitation. 10 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1509.09288
Subjects:General Physics (physics.gen-ph)
Journal reference:International Journal of Modern Physics D 25(12), 1644004 (2016)
DOI:10.1142/S0218271816440041
Cite as:arXiv:1605.09229 [physics.gen-ph]
 (or arXiv:1605.09229v3 [physics.gen-ph] for this version)

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