Dwarf Galaxies, MOND, and Relativistic Gravitation.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2010, Article ID 357342, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2010/357342 Review Article Dwarf Galaxies, MOND, and Relativistic Gravitation Arthur Kosowsky Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, 3941 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Arthur Kosowsky, kosowsky@ Received 5 June 2009; Revised 12 August 2009; Accepted 2 October 2009 Academic Editor: Elias Brinks Copyright © 2010 Arthur Kosowsky. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. MOND is a phenomenological modification of Newton’s law of gravitation which reproduces the dynamics of galaxies, without the need for additional dark matter. This paper reviews the basics of MOND and its application to dwarf galaxies. MOND is generally successful at reproducing stellar velocity dispersions in the Milky Way’s classical dwarf ellipticals, for reasonable values of the stellar mass-to-light ratio of the galaxies; two discrepantly high mass-to-light ratios may be explained by tidal effects. Recent observations also show MOND describes tidal dwarf galaxies, which form in complex dynamical environments. The application of MOND to galaxy clusters, where it fails to reproduce observed gas temperatures, is also reviewed. Relativistic theories containing MOND in the non-relativistic limit have now been formulated; they all contain new dynamical fields, which may serve as additional sources of gravitation that could reconcile cluster observations with MOND. Certain limits of these theories can also give the accelerating expansion of the Universe. The standard d