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> Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity Wait, really?

• jfengel 6y ago
  What they're saying is "The problem with the curves appears only in Newtonian gravity. If you take general relativity into account, maybe the problem goes away." That's been proposed before, though it's hard to do the calculations, and the differences in GR are thought to be too small to matter at that scale. I believe that this approach to demonstrating it is novel (reformulating it by analogy to Maxwell's equations and deriving a gravitational analogy to magnetism), but I'm afraid the math is beyond my pay grade. As far as I can tell, this kind of approach usually doesn't get traction because the evidence for dark matter goes well beyond galactic rotation curves. And what he's produced so far doesn't even cover the rotation curves completely. Intuitively, he's trying to make an effect like frame dragging (which requires hyper-precision satellite experiments to detect) account for a very large effect (big enough to require multiple galaxies worth of matter to account for). Gravity is very weak, and second-order effects are even weaker. So it seems unlikely. But it's not impossible.