James O'Brien
Springfield College
Recent applications of alternative gravity to the Bottema 2015 and Carignan 2013 galaxy samples and further implications of the data
Abstract
In the last few years, alternative gravity theories have seen increased interest due to the lack of observational evidence of dark matter. Further, new empirical patterns found in rotation curve data such as the Radial Acceleration Rule (RAR) have given new testable features for gravitational theories. In this talk, we revisit a two very popular surveys of galaxies (Carignan et al 2013 and Bottema et al 2015) which when published were shown to be problematic for alternative gravity. Here, we apply the most recent observational parameters to the surveys and provide fits of Conformal Gravity, MOND as well as the RAR rotation curve formalism and show how these theories can apply to the new findings. We also provide the fits to the RAR and Tully Fisher relation for each theory and discuss how the RAR may allow for some confining of parameters in the fitting procedure. A preliminary discussion of how RAR could be used to further test the validity of the Tully Fisher relation and distance estimates will be provided.