Are Galactic Rotation Curves Really Flat?

摘要

In this paper we identify an apparently previously unappreciated regularity in the systematics of galactic rotation curves; namely, we find that at the last detected points in galaxies of widely varying luminosity, the centripetal acceleration is found to have the completely universal form (v~2/c~2R)_last = γ_0/2 +γ~*N~*/2 + β~*N~*/R~2, where γ_0 and γ~* are new universal constants, β~* is the Schwarzschild radius of the Sun, and N~* is the total amount of visible matter in each galaxy. This regularity points to a possible role for the linear potentials associated with conformal gravity, with the galaxy-independent γ_0 term being found not to be generated from within individual galaxies at all but rather to be of cosmological origin, being due to the global Hubble flow of a necessarily spatially open universe of 3-space scalar curvature k = -(γ_0/2)~2= -2.3 * 10~-60 cm~-2.