3 ms·
It generally works a bit better if you say something like, "Hmm... it seems like this approach would be wrong, for this reason that just occurred to me. Am I mi
by Keysh 7y ago
It generally works a bit better if you say something like, "Hmm... it seems like this approach would be wrong, for this reason that just occurred to me. Am I missing something? Or: How do people in the field actually do it, so as to avoid this error?"
If, on the other hand, you assume they must all be stupider than you are and say things like "That is exactly one of the mistakes I suspect keeps being made", then you're basically saying, "I'll bet none of the hundreds or thousands of people working in this field for decades have ever thought of this one point that just occurred to me!" The latter is, shall we say, rather unlikely.
(In point of fact, Newton's shell theorem generalizes to the case of axisymmetric, flattened spheroids with homeoidal density distributions, a result that was derived by Laplace and others in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Which means that disks do behave somewhat like spheres.)
To get a sense of what's really involved, you could look at something like Brandt's 1960 paper, and then some of the papers that cite it (including some of the classic early papers by Vera Rubin and collaborators), to get an idea of how much more sophisticated than an simple Keplerian rotation curve:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1960ApJ...131..293B/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1960ApJ...131..293B/abstra...