UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Doug Edmonds, Penn State Hazleton

“Modified Dark Matter: Relating Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Baryonic Matter”

Modified dark matter (MDM) is a phenomenological model of dark matter, inspired by gravitational thermodynamics. For an accelerating Universe with positive cosmological constant ($\Lambda$), such phenomenological considerations lead to the emergence of a critical acceleration parameter related to $\Lambda$. Such a critical acceleration is an effective phenomenological manifestation of MDM, and is found in tight correlations between dark matter and baryonic matter in galaxy rotation curves. The resulting MDM mass profiles are consistent with observational data at both the galactic and cluster scales. In this talk, we will discuss the model and fits to data, where we find that the same critical acceleration appears at both galactic and galaxy cluster scales.