Smoking-gun evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration from Gaia observations of wide binary stars
phys.org
A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics.

My understanding is the researcher took Gaia probe information and looked at “wide binary stars” (not sure what defines wide, but there must be a ton of them), within 650 light years of earth. They found the ones that accelerate the least (relative to each other? Rotationally?) are, and this is where I get confused, moving more efficiently around each other than their faster counterparts?

This discrepancy is postulated to be due observations of the stars acting in different physics models based how much they’re accelerating relative to each other?

If this is correct (and the researcher is very transparent with their methods and using public data) would this up-end our models as much as I think it would? There’s probably a lot of things interacting with other things at very low relative acceptable throughout the universe. Or is this just highlighting a truth we already knew, that there’s a difference between the quantum and relative universes that we’re now able to roughly put a scale to?

I’ve added to my questions since lemmy has been down, what in the world does this paragraph mean? “Also, unlike other studies Chae calibrated the occurrence rate of hidden nested inner binaries at a benchmark acceleration.”

While doing some you tubing about this (thanks lemmy.world down time) I discovered Sabine hossenfelder, who I think is becoming one of my favorite science communicators I recommend anyone wondering about anything science to check her out https://youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder

  • marsokod
    10•1 year ago

    This is in line with all the MOND theories. The main problem with MOND theories is that so far we have not found one that would explain things better than dark matter. But this analysis shows that there are some observations were dark matter seems to break while MOND holds up better. This is quite interesting!

    One caveat with MOND is that we have to be careful about overfitting the data. You could very well elaborate a very complex model that fits all the observations, but at that point you are basically back to an empirical model.