Category: LCDM

Imagine if you can

Imagine if you can

Imagine if you are able that General Relativity (GR) is correct yet incomplete. Just as GR contains Newtonian gravity in the appropriate limit, imagine that GR itself is a limit of some still more general theory that we don’t yet know about. Let’s call it Underlying Theory (UT) for short. This is essentially the working hypothesis of quantum gravity, but here I want to consider a more general case in which the effects of UT are not limited to the tiny netherworld of the Planck scale. Perhaps UT has observable consequences on very large scales, or a scale that is not length-based at all. What would that look like, given that we only know GR?

For starters, it might mean that the conventional Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmology derived from GR is only a first approximation to the cosmology of the unknown deeper theory UT. In the first observational tests, FRW will look great, as the two are practically indistinguishable. As the data improve though, awkward problems might begin to crop up. What and where we don’t know, so our first inclination will not be to infer the existence of UT, but rather to patch up FRW with auxiliary hypotheses. Since the working presumption here is that GR is a correct limit, FRW will continue be a good approximation, and early departures will seem modest: they would not be interpreted as signs of UT.

What do we expect for cosmology anyway? A theory is only as good as its stated predictions. After Hubble established in the 1920s that galaxies external to the Milky Way existed and that the universe was expanding, it became clear that this was entirely natural in GR. Indeed, what was not natural was a static universe, the desire for which had led Einstein to introduce the cosmological constant (his “greatest blunder”).

A wide variety of geometries and expansion histories are possible with FRW. But there is one obvious case that stands out, that of Einstein-de Sitter (EdS, 1932). EdS has a matter density Ωm exactly equal to unity, balancing on the divide between a universe that expands forever (Ωm < 1) and one that eventually recollapses (Ωm > 1). The particular case Ωm = 1 is the only natural scale in the theory. It is also the only FRW model with a flat geometry, in the sense that initially parallel beams of light remain parallel indefinitely. These properties make it special in a way that obsessed cosmologists for many decades. (In retrospect, this obsession has the same flavor as the obsession the Ancients had with heavenly motions being perfect circles*.) A natural cosmology would therefor be one in which Ωm = 1 in normal matter (baryons).

By the 1970s, it was clear that there was no way you could have Ωm = 1 in baryons. There just wasn’t enough normal matter, either observed directly, or allowed by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Despite the appeal of Ωm = 1, it looked like we lived in an open universe with Ωm < 1.

This did not sit well with many theorists, who obsessed with the flatness problem. The mass density parameter evolves if it is not identically equal to one, so it was really strange that we should live anywhere close to Ωm = 1, even Ωm = 0.1, if the universe was going to spend eternity asymptoting to Ωm → 0. It was a compelling argument, enough to make most of us accept (in the early 1980s) the Inflationary model of the early universe, as Inflation gives a natural mechanism to drive Ωm → 1. The bulk of this mass could not be normal matter, but by then flat rotation curves had been discovered, along with a ton of other evidence that a lot of matter was dark. A third element that came in around the same time was another compelling idea, supersymmetry, which gave a natural mechanism by which the unseen mass could be non-baryonic. The confluence of these revelations gave us the standard cold dark matter (SCDM) cosmological model. It was EdS with Ωm = 1 mostly in dark matter. We didn’t know what the dark matter was, but we had a good idea (WIMPs), and it just seemed like a matter of tracking them down.

SCDM was absolutely Known for about a decade, pushing two depending on how you count. We were very reluctant to give it up. But over the course of the 1990s, it became clear [again] that Ωm < 1. What was different was a willingness, even a desperation, to accept and rehabilitate Einstein’s cosmological constant. This seemed to solve all cosmological problems, providing a viable concordance cosmology that satisfied all then-available data, salvaged Inflation and a flat geometry (Ωm + ΩΛ = 1, albeit at the expense of the coincidence problem, which is worse in LCDM than it is in open models), and made predictions that came true for the accelerated expansion rate and the location of the first peak of the acoustic power spectrum. This was a major revelation that led to Nobel prizes and still resonates today in the form of papers trying to suss out the nature of this so-called dark energy.

What if the issue is even more fundamental? Taking a long view, subsuming many essential details, we’ve gone from a natural cosmology (EdS) to a less natural one (an open universe with a low density in baryons) to SCDM (EdS with lots of non-baryonic dark matter) to LCDM. Maybe these are just successive approximations we’ve been obliged to make in order for FLRW** to mimic UT? How would we know?

One clue might be if the concordance region closed. Here is a comparison of a compilation of constraints assembled by students in my graduate cosmology course in 2002 (plus 2003 WMAP) with 2018 Planck parameters:

The shaded regions were excluded by the sum of the data available in 2003. The question I wondered then was whether the small remaining white space was indeed the correct answer, or merely the least improbable region left before the whole picture was ruled out. Had we painted ourselves into a corner?

If we take these results and the more recent Planck fits at face value, yes: nothing is left, the window has closed. However, other things change over time as well. For example, I’d grant a higher upper limit to Ωm than is illustrated above. The rotation curve line represents an upper limit that no longer pertains if dark matter halos are greatly modified by feedback. We were trying to avoid invoking that deus ex machina then, but there’s no helping it now.

Still, you can see in this diagram what we now call the Hubble tension. To solve that within the conventional FLRW framework, we have to come up with some new free parameter. There are lots of ideas that invoke new physics.

Maybe the new physics is UT? Maybe we have to keep tweaking FLRW because cosmology has reached a precision such that FLRW is no longer completely adequate as an approximation to UT? But if we are willing to add new parameters via “new physics” made up to address each new problem (dark matter, dark energy, something new and extra for the Hubble tension) so we can keep tweaking it indefinitely, how would we ever recognize that all we’re doing is approximating UT? If only there were different data that suggested new physics in an independent way.

Attitude matters. If we think both LCDM and the existence of dark matter is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, as clearly many physicists do, then any problem that arises is just a bit of trivia to sort out. Despite the current attention being given to the Hubble tension, I’d wager that most of the people not writing papers about it are presuming that the problem will go away: traditional measures of the Hubble constant will converge towards the Planck value. That might happen (or appear to happen through the magic of confirmation bias), and I would expect that myself if I hadn’t worked on H0 directly. It’s a lot easier to dismiss such things when you haven’t been involved enough to know how hard they are to dismiss***.

That last sentence pretty much sums up the community’s attitude towards MOND. That led me to pose the question of the year earlier. I have not heard any answers, just excuses to not have to answer. Still, these issues are presumably not unrelated. That MOND has so many predictions – even in cosmology – come true is itself an indication of UT. From that perspective, it is not surprising that we have to keep tweaking FLRW. Indeed, from this perspective, parameters like ΩCDM are chimeras lacking in physical meaning. They’re just whatever they need to be to fit whatever subset of the data is under consideration. That independent observations pretty much point to the same value is far compelling evidence in favor of LCDM than the accuracy of a fit to any single piece of information (like the CMB) where ΩCDM can be tuned to fit pretty much any plausible power spectrum. But is the stuff real? I make no apologies for holding science to a higher standard than those who consider a fit to the CMB data to be a detection.

It has taken a long time for cosmology to get this far. One should take a comparably long view of these developments, but we generally do not. Dark matter was already received wisdom when I was new to the field, unquestionably so. Dark energy was new in the ’90s but has long since been established as received wisdom. So if we now have to tweak it a little to fix this seemingly tiny tension in the Hubble constant, that seems incremental, not threatening to the pre-existing received wisdom. From the longer view, it looks like just another derailment in an excruciatingly slow-moving train wreck.

So I ask again: what would falsify FLRW cosmology? How do we know when to think outside this box, and not just garnish its edges?

*The obsession with circular motion continued through Copernicus, who placed the sun at the center of motion rather than the earth, but continued to employ epicycles. It wasn’t until over a half century later that Kepler finally broke with this particular obsession. In retrospect, we recognize circular motion as a very special case of the many possibilities available with elliptical orbits, just as EdS is only one possible cosmology with a flat geometry once we admit the possibility of a cosmological constant.

**FLRW = Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker. I intentionally excluded Lemaître from the early historical discussion because he (and the cosmological constant) were mostly excluded from considerations at that time. Mostly.

Someone with a longer memory than my own is Jim Peebles. I happened to bump into him while walking across campus while in Princeton for a meeting in early 2019. (He was finally awarded a Nobel prize later that year; it should have been in association with the original discovery of the CMB). On that occasion, he (unprompted) noted an analogy between the negative attitude towards the cosmological constant that was prevalent in the community pre-1990s to that for MOND now. NOT that he was in any way endorsing MOND; he was just noting that the sociology had the same texture, and could conceivably change on a similar timescale.

***Note that I am not dismissing the Planck results or any other data; I am suggesting the opposite: the data have become so good that it is impossible to continue to approximate UT with tweaks to FLRW (hence “new physics”). I’m additionally pointing out that important new physics has been staring us in the face for a long time.

Early Galaxy Formation and the Hubble Constant Tension

Early Galaxy Formation and the Hubble Constant Tension

Cosmology is challenged at present by two apparently unrelated problems: the apparent formation of large galaxies at unexpectedly high redshift observed by JWST, and the tension between the value of the Hubble constant obtained by traditional methods and that found in multi-parameter fits to the acoustic power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Maybe they’re not unrelated?

The Hubble Tension

Early results in precision cosmology from WMAP obtained estimates of the Hubble constant h = 0.73 ± 0.03 [I adopt the convention h = H0/(100 km s-1 Mpc-1) so as not to have to have to write the units every time.] This was in good agreement with contemporaneous local estimates from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant: h = 0.72 ± 0.08. This is what Hubble was built to do. It did it, and the vast majority of us were satisfied* at the time that it had succeeded in doing so.

Since that time, a tension has emerged as accuracy has improved. Precise local measures** give h = 0.73 ± 0.01 while fits to the Planck CMB data give h = 0.6736 ± 0.0054. This is around the 5 sigma threshold for believing there is a real difference. Our own results exclude h < 0.705 at 95% confidence. A value as low as 67 is right out.

Given the history of the distance scale, it is tempting to suppose that local measures are at fault. This seems to be the prevailing presumption, and it is just a matter of figuring out what went wrong this time. Of course, things can go wrong with the CMB too, so this way of thinking raises the ever-present danger of confirmation bias, ever a scourge in cosmology. Looking at the history of H0 determinations, it is not local estimates of H0 but rather those from CMB fits that have diverged from the concordance region.

The cosmic mass density parameter and Hubble constant. These covary in CMB fits along the line Ωmh3 = 0.09633 ± 0.00029 (red). Also shown are best-fit values from CMB experiments over time, as labeled (WMAP3 is the earliest shown; Planck2018 the most recent). These all fall along the line of constant Ωmh3, but have diverged over time from concordance with local data. There are many examples of local constraints; for illustration I show examples from Cole et al. (2005), Mohayaee & Tully (2005), Tully et al. (2016), and Riess et al. (2001). The divergence has occurred as finer angular scales have been observed in the CMB power spectrum and correspondingly higher multiples ℓ have been incorporated into fits.


The divergence between local and CMB-determined H0 has occurred as finer angular scales have been observed in the CMB power spectrum and correspondingly higher multiples ℓ have been incorporated into fits. That suggests that the issue resides in the high-ℓ part of the CMB data*** rather than in some systematic in the local determinations. Indeed, if one restricts the analysis of the Planck (“TT”) data to ℓ < 801, one obtains h = 0.70 ± 0.02 (see their Fig. 22), consistent with earlier CMB estimates as well as with local ones.

Photons must traverse the entire universe to reach us from the surface of last scattering. Along the way, they are subject to 21 cm absorption by neutral hydrogen, Thomson scattering by free electrons after reionization, blue and redshifting from traversing gravitational potentials in an expanding universe (the late ISW effect, aka the Rees-Sciama effect), and deflection by gravitational lensing. Lensing is a subtle effect that blurs the surface of last scattering and adds a source of fluctuations not intrinsic to it. The amount of lensing can be calculated from the growth rate of structure; anomalously fast galaxy formation would induce extra power at high ℓ.

Early Galaxy Formation

JWST observations evince the early emergence of massive galaxies at z ≈ 10. This came as a great surprise theoretically, but the empirical result extends previous observations that galaxies grew too big too fast. Taking the data at face value, more structure appears to exist in the early universe than anticipated in the standard calculation. This would cause excess lensing and an anomalous source of power on fine scales. This would be a real, physical anomaly (new physics), not some mistake in the processing of CMB data (which may of course happen, just as with any other sort of data). Here are the Planck data:

Unbinned Planck data with the best-fit power spectrum (red line) and a model (blue line) with h=0.73 and Ωm adjusted to maintain constant Ωmh3. The ratio of the models is shown at bottom, that with = 0.67 divided by the model with h = 0.73. The difference is real; h = 0.67 gives the better fit****. The ratio illustrates the subtle need for slightly greater power with increasing ℓ than provided by the model with h = 0.73. Perhaps this high-ℓ power has a contribution from anomalous gravitational lensing that skews the fit and drives the Hubble tension.

If excess lensing by early massive galaxies occurs but goes unrecognized, fits to the CMB data would be subtly skewed. There would be more power at high ℓ than there should be. Fitting this extra power would drive up Ωm and other relevant parameters*****. In response, it would be necessary to reduce h to maintain a constant Ωmh3. This would explain the temporal evolution of the best fit values, so I posit that this effect may be driving the Hubble tension.

The early formation of massive galaxies would represent a real, physical anomaly. This is unexpected in ΛCDM but not unanticipated. Sanders (1998) explicitly predicted the formation of massive galaxies by z = 10. Excess gravitational lensing by these early galaxies is a natural consequence of his prediction. Other things follow as well: early reionization, an enhanced ISW/Rees-Sciama effect, and high redshift 21 cm absorption. In short, everything that is puzzling about the early universe from the ΛCDM perspective was anticipated and often explicitly predicted in advance.

The new physics driving the prediction of Sanders (1998) is MOND. This is the same driver of anomalies in galaxy dynamics, and perhaps now also of the Hubble tension. These predictive successes must be telling us something, and highlight the need for a deeper theory. Whether this finally breaks ΛCDM or we find yet another unsatisfactory out is up to others to decide.

*Indeed, the ± 0.08 rather undersells the accuracy of the result. I quote that because the Key Project team gave it as their bottom line. However, if you read the paper, you see statements like h = 0.71 ± 0.02 (random) ± 0.06 (systematic). The first is the statistical error of the experiment, while the latter is an estimate of how badly it might go wrong (e.g., susceptibility to a recalibration of the Cepheid scale). With the benefit of hindsight, we can say now that the Cepheid calibration has not changed that much: they did indeed get it right to something more like ± 0.02 than ± 0.08.

**An intermediate value is given by Freedman (2021): h = 0.698 ± 0.006, which gives the appearance of a tension between Cepheid and TRGB calibrations. However, no such tension is seen between Cepheid and TRGB calibrators of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, which gives h = 0.751 ± 0.023. This suggests that the tension is not between the Cepheid and TRGB method so much as it is between applications of the TRGB method by different groups.

***I recall being at a conference when the Planck data were fresh where people were visibly puzzled at the divergence of their fit from the local concordance region. It was obvious to everyone that this had come about when the high ℓ data were incorporated. We had no idea why, and people were reluctant to contradict the Authority of the CMB fit, but it didn’t sit right. Since that time, the Planck result has been normalized to the point where I hear its specific determination of cosmic parameters used interchangeably with ΛCDM. And indeed, the best fit is best for good reason; determinations that are in conflict with Planck are either wrong or indicate new physics.

****The sharp eye will also notice a slight offset in the absolute scale. This is fungible with the optical depth due to reionization, which acts as a light fog covering the whole sky: higher optical depth τ depresses the observed amplitude of the CMB. The need to fit the absolute scale as well as the tip in the shape of the power spectrum would explain another temporal evolution in the best-fit CMB parameters, that of declining optical depth from WMAP and early (2013) Planck (τ = 0.09) to 2018 Planck (τ = 0.0544).

*****The amplitude of the power spectrum σ8 would also be affected. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also a tension between local and CMB determinations of this parameter. All parameters must be fit simultaneously, so how it comes out in the wash depends on the details of the history of the nonlinear growth of structure. Such a calculation is beyond the scope of this note. Indeed, I hope someone else takes up the challenge, as I tire of solving all the problems only to have them ignored. Better if everyone else comes to grip with this for themselves.

Question of the Year (and a challenge)

Why does MOND get any predictions right?

That’s the question of the year, and perhaps of the century. I’ve been asking it since before this century began, and I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer. Most of the relevant scientific community has aggressively failed to engage with it. Even if MOND is wrong for [insert favorite reason], this does not relieve us of the burden to understand why it gets many predictions right – predictions that have repeatedly come as a surprise to the community that has declined to engage, preferring to ignore the elephant in the room.

It is not good enough to explain MOND phenomenology post facto with some contrived LCDM model. That’s mostly1 what is on offer, being born of the attitude that we’re sure LCDM is right, so somehow MOND phenomenology must emerge from it. We could just as [un]reasonably adopt the attitude that MOND is correct, so surely LCDM phenomenology happens as a result of trying to fit the standard cosmological model to some deeper, subtly different theory.

A basic tenet of the scientific method is that if a theory has its predictions come true, we are obliged to acknowledge its efficacy. This is how we know when to change our minds. This holds even if we don’t like said theory – especially if we don’t like it.

That was my experience with MOND. It correctly predicted the kinematics of the low surface brightness galaxies I was interested in. Dark matter did not. The data falsified all the models available at the time, including my own dark matter-based hypothesis. The only successful a priori predictions were those made by Milgrom. So what am I to conclude2 from this? That he was wrong?

Since that time, MOND has been used to make a lot of further predictions that came true. Predictions for specific objects that cannot even be made with LCDM. Post-hoc explanations abound, but are not satisfactory as they fail to address the question of the year. If LCDM is correct, why is it that MOND keeps making novel predictions that LCDM consistently finds surprising? This has happened over and over again.

I understand the reluctance to engage. It really ticked me off that my own model was falsified. How could this stupid theory of Milgrom’s do better for my galaxies? Indeed, how could it get anything right? I had no answer to this, nor does the wider community. It is not for lack of trying on my part; I’ve spent a lot of time3 building conventional dark matter models. They don’t work. Most of the models made by others that I’ve seen are just variations on models I had already considered and rejected as obviously unworkable. They might look workable from one angle, but they inevitably fail from some other, solving one problem at the expense of another.

Predictive success does not guarantee that a theory is right, but it does make it better than competing theories that fail for the same prediction. This is where MOND and LCDM are difficult to compare, as the relevant data are largely incommensurate. Where one is eloquent, the other tends to be muddled. However, it has been my experience that MOND more frequently reproduces the successes of dark matter than vice-versa. I expect this statement comes as a surprise to some, as it certainly did to me (see the comment line of astro-ph/9801102). The people who say the opposite clearly haven’t bothered to check2 as I have, or even to give MOND a real chance. If you come to a problem sure you know the answer, no data will change your mind. Hence:

A challenge: What would falsify the existence of dark matter?

If LCDM is a scientific theory, it should be falsifiable4. Dark matter, by itself, is a concept, not a theory: mass that is invisible. So how can we tell if it’s not there? Once we have convinced ourselves that the universe is full of invisible stuff that we can’t see or (so far) detect any other way, how do we disabuse ourselves of this notion, should it happen to be wrong? If it is correct, we can in principle find it in the lab, so its existence can be confirmed. But is it falsifiable? How?

That is my challenge to the dark matter community: what would convince you that the dark matter picture is wrong? Answers will vary, as it is up to each individual to decide for themself how to answer. But there has to be an answer. To leave this basic question unaddressed is to abandon the scientific method.

I’ll go first. Starting in 1985 when I was first presented evidence in a class taught by Scott Tremaine, I was as much of a believer in dark matter as anyone. I was even a vigorous advocate, for a time. What convinced me to first doubt the dark matter picture was the fine-tuning I had to engage in to salvage it. It was only after that experience that I realized that the problems I was encountering were caused by the data doing what MOND had predicted – something that really shouldn’t happen if dark matter is running the show. But the MOND part came after; I had already become dubious about dark matter in its own context.

Falsifiability is a question every scientist who works on dark matter needs to face. What would cause you to doubt the existence of dark matter? Nothing is not a scientific answer. Neither is it correct to assert that the evidence for dark matter is already overwhelming. That is a misstatement: the evidence for acceleration discrepancies is overwhelming, but these can be interpreted as evidence for either dark matter or MOND.

This important thing is to establish criteria by which you would change your mind. I changed my mind before: I am no longer convinced that the solution the acceleration discrepancy has to be non-baryonic dark matter. I will change my mind again if the evidence warrants. Let me state, yet again, what would cause me to doubt that MOND is a critical element of said solution. There are lots of possibilities, as MOND is readily falsifiable. Three important ones are:

  1. MOND getting a fundamental prediction wrong;
  2. Detecting dark matter;
  3. Answering the question of the year.

None of these have happened yet. Just shouting MOND is falsified already! doesn’t make it so: the evidence has to be both clear and satisfactory. For example,

  1. MOND might be falsified by cluster data, but it’s apparent failure is not fundamental. There is a residual missing mass problem in the richest clusters, but there’s nothing in MOND that says we have to have detected all the baryons by now. Indeed, LCDM doesn’t fare better, just differently, with both theories suffering a missing baryon problem. The chief difference is that we’re willing to give LCDM endless mulligans but MOND none at all. Where the problem for MOND in clusters comes up all the time, the analogous problem in LCDM is barely discussed, and is not even recognized as a problem.
  2. A detection of dark matter would certainly help. To be satisfactory, it can’t be an isolated signal in a lone experiment that no one else can reproduce. If a new particle is detected, its properties have to be correct (e.g, it has the right mass density, etc.). As always, we must be wary of some standard model event masquerading as dark matter. WIMP detectors will soon reach the neutrino background accumulated from all the nuclear emissions of stars over the course of cosmic history, at which time they will start detecting weakly interacting particles as intended: neutrinos. Those aren’t the dark matter, but what are the odds that the first of those neutrino detections will be eagerly misinterpreted as dark matter?
  3. Finally, the question of the year: why does MOND get any prediction right? To provide a satisfactory answer to this, one must come up with a physical model that provides a compelling explanation for the phenomena and has the same ability as MOND to make novel predictions. Just building a post-hoc model to match the data, which is the most common approach, doesn’t provide a satisfactory, let alone a compelling, explanation for the phenomenon, and provides no predictive power at all. If it did, we could have predicted MOND-like phenomenology and wouldn’t have to build these models after the fact.

So far, none of these three things have been clearly satisfied. The greatest danger to MOND comes from MOND itself: the residual mass discrepancy in clusters, the tension in Galactic data (some of which favor MOND, other of which don’t), and the apparent absence of dark matter in some galaxies. While these are real problems, they are also of the scale that is expected in the normal course of science: there are always tensions and misleading tidbits of information; I personally worry the most about the Galactic data. But even if my first point is satisfied and MOND fails on its own merits, that does not make dark matter better.

A large segment of the scientific community seems to suffer a common logical fallacy: any problem with MOND is seen as a success for dark matter. That’s silly. One has to evaluate the predictions of dark matter for the same observation to see how it fares. My experience has been that observations that are problematic for MOND are also problematic for dark matter. The latter often survives by not making a prediction at all, which is hardly a point in its favor.

Other situations are just plain weird. For example, it is popular these days to cite the absence of dark matter in some ultradiffuse galaxies as a challenge to MOND, which they are. But neither does it make sense to have galaxies without dark matter in a universe made of dark matter. Such a situation can be arranged, but the circumstances are rather contrived and usually involve some non-equilibrium dynamics. That’s fine; that can happen on rare occasions, but disequilibrium situations can happen in MOND too (the claims of falsification inevitably assume equilibrium). We can’t have it both ways, permitting special circumstances for one theory but not for the other. Worse, some examples of galaxies that are claimed to be devoid of dark matter are as much a problem for LCDM as for MOND. A disk galaxy devoid of either can’t happen; we need something to stabilize disks.

So where do we go from here? Who knows! There are fundamental questions that remain unanswered, and that’s a good thing. There is real science yet to be done. We can make progress if we stick to the scientific method. There is more to be done than measuring cosmological parameters to the sixth place of decimals. But we have to start by setting standards for falsification. If there is no observation or experimental result that would disabuse you of your current belief system, then that belief system is more akin to religion than to science.

1There are a few ideas, like superfluid dark matter, that try to automatically produce MOND phenomenology. This is what needs to happen. It isn’t clear yet whether these ideas work, but reproducing the MOND phenomenology naturally is a minimum standard that has to be met for a model to be viable. Run of the mill CDM models that invoke feedback do not meet this standard. They can always be made to reproduce the data once observed, but not to predict it in advance as MOND does.

2There is a common refrain that “MOND fits rotation curves and nothing else.” This is a myth, plain and simple. A good, old-fashioned falsehood sustained by the echo chamber effect. (That’s what I heard!) Seriously: if you are a scientist who thinks this, what is your source? Did it come from a review of MOND, or from idle chit-chat? How many MOND papers have you read? What do you actually know about it? Ignorance is not a strong position from which to draw a scientific conclusion.

3Like most of the community, I have invested considerably more effort in dark matter than in MOND. Where I differ from much of the galaxy formation community* is in admitting when those efforts fail. There is a temptation to slap some lipstick on the dark matter pig and claim success just to go along to get along, but what is the point of science if that is what we do when we encounter an inconvenient result? For me, MOND has been an incredibly inconvenient result. I would love to be able to falsify it, but so far intellectual honesty forbids.

*There is a widespread ethos of toxic positivity in the galaxy formation literature, which habitually puts a more positive spin on results than is objectively warranted. I’m aware of at least one prominent school where students are taught “to be optimistic” and omit mention of caveats that might detract from the a model’s reception. This is effective in a careerist sense, but antithetical to the scientific endeavor.

4The word “falsification” carries a lot of philosophical baggage that I don’t care to get into here. The point is that there must be a way to tell if a theory is wrong. If there is not, we might as well be debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Remain Skeptical

Remain Skeptical

I would like to write something positive to close out the year. Apparently, it is not in my nature, as I am finding it difficult to do so. I try not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, and as a consequence I have said little here for weeks at a time.

Still, there are good things that happened this year. JWST launched a year ago. The predictions I made for it at that time have since been realized. There have been some bumps along the way, with some of the photometric redshifts for very high z galaxies turning out to be wrong. They have not all turned out to be wrong, and the current consensus seems to be converging towards acceptance of there existing a good number of relatively bright galaxies at z > 10. Some of these have been ‘confirmed’ by spectroscopy.

I remain skeptical of some of the spectra as well as the photometric redshifts. There isn’t much spectrum to see at these rest frame ultraviolet wavelengths. There aren’t a lot of obvious, distinctive features in the spectra that make for definitive line identifications, and the universe is rather opaque to the UV photons blueward of the Lyman break. Here is an example from the JADES survey:

Images and spectra of z > 10 galaxy candidates from JADES. [Image Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), Leah Hustak (STScI); Science Credits: Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), E. Curtis-Lake (UOH), S. Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore), JADES Collaboration]

Despite the lack of distinctive spectral lines, there is a clear shape that is ramping up towards the blue until hitting a sharp edge. This is consistent with the spectrum of a star forming galaxy with young stars that make a lot of UV light: the upward bend is expected for such a population, and hard to explain otherwise. The edge is cause by opacity: intervening gas and dust gobbles up those photons, few of which are likely to even escape their host galaxy, much less survive the billions of light-years to be traversed between there-then and here-now. So I concur that the most obvious interpretation of these spectra is that of high-z galaxies even if we don’t have the satisfaction of seeing blatantly obvious emission lines like C IV or Mg II (ionized species of carbon and magnesium that are frequently seen in the spectra of quasars). [The obscure nomenclature dates back to nineteenth century laboratory spectroscopy. Mg I is neutral, Mg II singly ionized, C IV triply ionized.]

Even if we seem headed towards consensus on the reality of big galaxies at high redshift, the same cannot yet be said about their interpretation. This certainly came as a huge surprise to astronomers not me. The obvious interpretation is the theory that predicted this observation in advance, no?

Apparently not. Another predictable phenomenon is that people will self-gaslight themselves into believing that this was expected all along. I have been watching in real time as the community makes the transition from “there is nothing above redshift 7” (the prediction of LCDM contemporary with Bob Sanders’s MOND prediction that galaxy mass objects form by z=10) to “this was unexpected!” and is genuinely problematic to “Nah, we’re good.” This is the same trajectory I’ve seen the community take with the cusp-core problem, the missing satellite problem, the RAR, the existence of massive clusters of galaxies at surprisingly high redshift, etc., etc. A theory is only good to the extent that its predictions are not malleable enough to be made to fit any observation.

As I was trying to explain on twitter that individually high mass galaxies had not been expected in LCDM, someone popped into my feed to assert that they had multiple simulations with galaxies that massive. That certainly had not been the case all along, so this just tells me that LCDM doesn’t really make a prediction here that can’t be fudged (crank up the star formation efficiency!). This is worse than no prediction at all: you can never know that you’re wrong, as you can fix any failing. Worse, it has been my experience that there is always someone willing to play the role of fixer, usually some ambitious young person eager to gain credit for saving the most favored theory. It works – I can point to many Ivy league careers that followed this approach. They don’t even have to work hard at it, as the community is predisposed to believe what they want to hear.

These are all reasons why predictions made in advance of the relevant observation are the most valuable.

That MOND has consistently predicted, in advance, results that were surprising to LCDM is a fact that the community apparently remains unaware of. Communication is inefficient, so for a long time I thought this sufficed as an explanation. That is no longer the case; the only explanation that fits the sociological observations is that the ignorance is willful.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

We have been spoiled. The last 400 years has given us the impression that science progresses steadily and irresistibly forward. This is in no way guaranteed. Science progresses in fits and starts; it only looks continuous when the highlights are viewed in retrospective soft focus. Progress can halt and even regress, as happened abruptly with the many engineering feats of the Romans with the fall of their empire. Science is a human endeavor subject to human folly, and we might just as easily have a thousand years of belief in invisible mass as we did in epicycles.

Despite all this, I remain guardedly optimistic that we can and will progress. I don’t know what the right answer is. The first step is to let go of being sure that we do.

I’ll end with a quote pointed out to me by David Merritt that seems to apply today as it did centuries ago:

“The scepticism of that generation was the most uncompromising that the world has known; for it did not even trouble to deny: it simply ignored. It presented a blank wall of perfect indifference alike to the mysteries of the universe and to the solutions of them.”

Books and Characters by Lytton Strachey (chapter on Mme du Deffand)

Live long, and prosper in the new year. Above all, remain skeptical.

An early result from JWST

An early result from JWST

There has been a veritable feeding frenzy going on with the first JWST data. This is to be expected. Also to be expected is that some of these early results will ultimately prove to have been premature. So – caveat emptor! That said, I want to highlight one important aspect of these early results, there being too many to do all them all justice.

The basic theme is that people are finding very faint yet surprisingly bright galaxies that are consistent with being at redshift 9 and above. The universe has expanded by a factor of ten since then, when it was barely half a billion years old. That’s a long time to you and me, and even to a geologist, but it is a relatively short time for a universe that is now over 13 billion years old, and it isn’t a lot of time for objects as large as galaxies to form.

In the standard LCDM cosmogony, we expect large galaxies to build up from the merger of many smaller galaxies. These smaller galaxies form first, and many of the stars that end up in big galaxies may have formed in these smaller galaxies prior to merging. So when we look to high redshift, we expect to catch this formation-by-merging process in action. We should see lots of small, actively star forming protogalactic fragments (Searle-Zinn fragments in Old School speak) before they’ve had time to assemble into the large galaxies we see relatively nearby to us at low redshift.

So what are we seeing? Here is one example from Labbe et al.:

JWST images of a candidate galaxy at z~10 in different filters, ordered by increasing wavelength from optical light (left) to the mid-infrared (right). Image credit: Labbe et al.

Not much to look at, is it? But really it is pretty awesome for light that has been traveling 13 billion years to get to us and had its wavelength stretched by a factor of ten. Measuring the brightness in these various passbands enables us to estimate both its redshift and stellar mass:

The JWST data plotted as a spectrum (points) with template stellar population models (lines) that indicate a mass of nearly 85 billion suns at z=9.92. Image credit: Labbe et al.

Eighty five billion solar masses is a lot of stars. It’s a bit bigger than the Milky Way, which has had the full 13+ billion years to make its complement of roughly 60 billion solar masses of stars. Object 19424 is a big galaxy, and it grew up fast.

In LCDM, it is not particularly hard to build a model that forms a lot of stars early on. What is challenging is assembling this many into a single object. We should see lots of much smaller fragments (and may yet still) but we shouldn’t see many really big objects like this already in place. How many there are is a critical question.

Labbe et al. make an estimate of the stellar mass density in massive high redshift galaxies, and find it to be rather a lot. This is a fraught exercise in the best of circumstances when one has excellent data for thousands of galaxies. Here we have only a handful. We must also assume that the small region surveyed is typical, which it may not be. Moreover, the photometric redshift method illustrated above is fraught. It looks convincing. It is convincing. It also gives me the heebie-jeebies. Many times I have seen photometric redshifts turn out to be wrong when good spectroscopic data are obtained. But usually the method works, and it’s what we got so far, so let’s see where this ride takes us.

A short paper that nicely illustrates the prime issue is provided by Prof. Boylan-Kolchin. His key figure:

The integrated mass density of stars as a function of the stellar mass of individual galaxies, or equivalently, the baryons available to form stars in their dark matter halos. The data of Labbe et al. reside in the forbidden region (shaded) where there are more stars than there is normal matter from which to make them. Image credit: Boylan-Kolchin.

The basic issue is that there are too many stars in these big galaxies. There are many astrophysical uncertainties about how stars form: how fast, how efficiently, with what mass distribution, etc., etc. – much of the literature is obsessed with these issues. In contrast, once the parameters of cosmology are known, as we think them to be, it is relatively straightforward to calculate the number density of dark matter halos as a function of mass at a given redshift. This is the dark skeleton on which large scale structure depends; getting this right is absolutely fundamental to the cold dark matter picture.

Every dark matter halo should host a universal fraction of normal matter. The baryon fraction (fb) is known to be very close to 16% in LCDM. Prof. Boylan-Kolchin points out that this sets an important upper limit on how many stars could possibly form. The shaded region in the figure above is excluded: there simply isn’t enough normal matter to make that many stars. The data of Labbe et al. fall in this region, which should be impossible.

The data only fall a little way into the excluded region, so maybe it doesn’t look that bad, but the real situation is more dire. Star formation is very inefficient, but the shaded region assumes that all the available material has been converted into stars. A more realistic expectation is closer to the gray line (ε = 0.1), not the hard limit where all the available material has been magically turned into stars with a cosmic snap of the fingers.

Indeed, I would argue that the real efficiency ε is likely lower than 0.1 as it is locally. This runs into problems with precursors of the JWST result, so we’ve already been under pressure to tweak this free parameter upwards. Turning it up to eleven is just the inevitable consequence of needing to get more stars to form in the first big halos to appear sooner than the theory naturally predicts.

So, does this spell doom for LCDM? I doubt it. There are too many uncertainties at present. It is an intriguing result, but it will take a lot of follow-up work to sort out. I expect some of these candidate high redshift galaxies will fall by the wayside, and turn out to be objects at lower redshift. How many, and how that impacts the basic result, remains to be determined.

After years of testing LCDM, it would be ironic if it could be falsified by this one simple (expensive, technologically amazing) observation. Still, it is something important to watch, as it is at least conceivable that we could measure a stellar mass density that is impossibly high. Wither then?

These are early days.

JWST Twitter Bender

JWST Twitter Bender

I went on a bit of a twitter bender yesterday about the early claims about high mass galaxies at high redshift, which went on long enough I thought I should share it here.

For those watching the astro community freak out about bright, high redshift galaxies being detected by JWST, some historical context in an amusing anecdote…

The 1998 October conference was titled “After the dark ages, when galaxies were young (the universe at 2 < z < 5).” That right there tells you what we were expecting. Redshift 5 was high – when the universe was a mere billion years old. Before that, not much going on (dark ages).

This was when the now famous SN Ia results corroborating the acceleration of the expansion rate predicted by concordance LCDM were shiny and new. Many of us already strongly suspected we needed to put the Lambda back in cosmology; the SN results sealed the deal.

One of the many lines of evidence leading to the rehabilitation of Lambda – previously anathema – was that we needed a bit more time to get observed structures to form. One wants the universe to be older than its contents, an off and on problem with globular clusters for forever.

A natural question that arises is just how early do galaxies form? The horizon of z=7 came up in discussion at lunch, with those of us who were observers wondering how we might access that (JWST being the answer long in the making).

Famed simulator Carlos Frenk was there, and assured us not to worry. He had already done LCDM simulations, and knew the timing.

“There is nothing above redshift 7.”

He also added “don’t quote me on that,” which I’ve respected until now, but I think the statute of limitations has expired.

Everyone present immediately pulled out their wallet and chipped in $5 to endow the “7-up” prize for the first persuasive detection of an object at or above redshift seven.

A committee was formed to evaluate claims that might appear in the literature, composed of Carlos, Vera Rubin, and Bruce Partridge. They made it clear that they would require a high standard of evidence: at least two well-identified lines; no dropouts or photo-z’s.

That standard wasn’t met for over a decade, with z=6.96 being the record holder for a while. The 7-up prize was entirely tongue in cheek, and everyone forgot about it. Marv Leventhal had offered to hold the money; I guess he ended up pocketing it.

I believe the winner of the 7-up prize should have been Nial Tanvir for GRB090423 at z~8.2, but I haven’t checked if there might be other credible claims, and I can’t speak for the committee.

At any rate, I don’t think anyone would now seriously dispute that there are galaxies at z>7. The question is how big do they get, how early? And the eternal mobile goalpost, what does LCDM really predict?

Carlos was not wrong. There is no hard cutoff, so I won’t quibble about arbitrary boundaries like z=7. It takes time to assemble big galaxies, & LCDM does make a reasonably clear prediction about the timeline for that to occur. Basically, they shouldn’t be all that big that soon.

Here is a figure adapted from the thesis Jay Franck wrote here 5 years ago using Spitzer data (round points). It shows the characteristic brightness (Schechter M*) of galaxies as a function of redshift. The data diverge from the LCDM prediction (squares) as redshift increases.

The divergence happens because real galaxies are brighter (more stellar mass has assembled into a single object) than predicted by the hierarchical timeline expected in LCDM.

Remarkably, the data roughly follow the green line, which is an L* galaxy magically put in place at the inconceivably high redshift of z=10. Galaxies seem to have gotten big impossibly early. This is why you see us astronomers flipping our lids at the JWST results. Can’t happen.

Except that it can, and was predicted to do so by Bob Sanders a quarter century ago: “Objects of galaxy mass are the first virialized objects to form (by z=10) and larger structure develops rapidly.”

The reason is MOND. After decoupling, the baryons find themselves bereft of radiation support and suddenly deep in the low acceleration regime. Structure grows fast and becomes nonlinear almost immediately. It’s as if there is tons more dark matter than we infer nowadays.

I referreed that paper, and was a bit disappointed that Bob had beat me to it: I was doing something similar at the time, with similar results. Instead of being hard to form structure quickly as in LCDM, it’s practically impossible to avoid in MOND.

He beat me to it, so I abandoned writing that paper. No need to say the same thing twice! Didn’t think we’d have to wait so long to test it.

I’ve reviewed this many times. Most recently in January, in anticipation of JWST, on my blog.

See also http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/LSSinMOND.html… and the references therein. For a more formal review, see A Tale of Two Paradigms: the Mutual Incommensurability of LCDM and MOND. Or Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND): Observational Phenomenology and Relativistic Extensions. Or Modified Newtonian Dynamics as an Alternative to Dark Matter.

How many times does it have to be said?

But you get the point. Every time you see someone describe the big galaxies JWST is seeing as unexpected, what they mean is unexpected in LCDM. It doesn’t surprise me at all. It is entirely expected in MOND, and was predicted a priori.

The really interesting thing to me, though, remains what LCDM really predicts. I already see people rationalizing excuses. I’ve seen this happen before. Many times. That’s why the field is in a rut.

Progress towards the dark land.

So are we gonna talk our way out of it this time? I’m no longer interested in how; I’m sure someone will suggest something that will gain traction no matter how unsatisfactory.

Special pleading.

The only interesting question is if LCDM makes a prediction here that can’t be fudged. If it does, then it can be falsified. If it doesn’t, it isn’t science.

Experimentalist with no clue what he has signed up for about to find out how hard it is to hunt down an invisible target.

But can we? Is LCDM subject to falsification? Or will we yet again gaslight ourselves into believing that we knew it all along?

Common ground

Common ground

In order to agree on an interpretation, we first have to agree on the facts. Even when we agree on the facts, the available set of facts may admit multiple interpretations. This was an obvious and widely accepted truth early in my career*. Since then, the field has decayed into a haphazardly conceived set of unquestionable absolutes that are based on a large but well-curated subset of facts that gratuitously ignores any subset of facts that are inconvenient.

Sadly, we seem to have entered a post-truth period in which facts are drowned out by propaganda. I went into science to get away from people who place faith before facts, and comfortable fictions ahead of uncomfortable truths. Unfortunately, a lot of those people seem to have followed me here. This manifests as people who quote what are essentially pro-dark matter talking points at me like I don’t understand LCDM, when all it really does is reveal that they are posers** who picked up on some common myths about the field without actually reading the relevant journal articles.

Indeed, a recent experience taught me a new psychology term: identity protective cognition. Identity protective cognition is the tendency for people in a group to selectively credit or dismiss evidence in patterns that reflect the beliefs that predominate in their group. When it comes to dark matter, the group happens to be a scientific one, but the psychology is the same: I’ve seen people twist themselves into logical knots to protect their belief in dark matter from being subject to critical examination. They do it without even recognizing that this is what they’re doing. I guess this is a human foible we cannot escape.

I’ve addressed these issues before, but here I’m going to start a series of posts on what I think some of the essential but underappreciated facts are. This is based on a talk that I gave at a conference on the philosophy of science in 2019, back when we had conferences, and published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. I paid the exorbitant open access fee (the journal changed its name – and publication policy – during the publication process), so you can read the whole thing all at once if you are eager. I’ve already written it to be accessible, so mostly I’m going to post it here in what I hope are digestible chunks, and may add further commentary if it seems appropriate.

Cosmic context

Cosmology is the science of the origin and evolution of the universe: the biggest of big pictures. The modern picture of the hot big bang is underpinned by three empirical pillars: an expanding universe (Hubble expansion), Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN: the formation of the light elements through nuclear reactions in the early universe), and the relic radiation field (the Cosmic Microwave Background: CMB) (Harrison, 2000; Peebles, 1993). The discussion here will take this framework for granted.

The three empirical pillars fit beautifully with General Relativity (GR). Making the simplifying assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy, Einstein’s equations can be applied to treat the entire universe as a dynamical entity. As such, it is compelled either to expand or contract. Running the observed expansion backwards in time, one necessarily comes to a hot, dense, early phase. This naturally explains the CMB, which marks the transition from an opaque plasma to a transparent gas (Sunyaev and Zeldovich, 1980; Weiss, 1980). The abundances of the light elements can be explained in detail with BBN provided the universe expands in the first few minutes as predicted by GR when radiation dominates the mass-energy budget of the universe (Boesgaard & Steigman, 1985).

The marvelous consistency of these early universe results with the expectations of GR builds confidence that the hot big bang is the correct general picture for cosmology. It also builds overconfidence that GR is completely sufficient to describe the universe. Maintaining consistency with modern cosmological data is only possible with the addition of two auxiliary hypotheses: dark matter and dark energy. These invisible entities are an absolute requirement of the current version of the most-favored cosmological model, ΛCDM. The very name of this model is born of these dark materials: Λ is Einstein’s cosmological constant, of which ‘dark energy’ is a generalization, and CDM is cold dark matter.

Dark energy does not enter much into the subject of galaxy formation. It mainly helps to set the background cosmology in which galaxies form, and plays some role in the timing of structure formation. This discussion will not delve into such details, and I note only that it was surprising and profoundly disturbing that we had to reintroduce (e.g., Efstathiou et al., 1990; Ostriker and Steinhardt, 1995; Perlmutter et al., 1999; Riess et al., 1998; Yoshii and Peterson, 1995) Einstein’s so-called ‘greatest blunder.’

Dark matter, on the other hand, plays an intimate and essential role in galaxy formation. The term ‘dark matter’ is dangerously crude, as it can reasonably be used to mean anything that is not seen. In the cosmic context, there are at least two forms of unseen mass: normal matter that happens not to glow in a way that is easily seen — not all ordinary material need be associated with visible stars — and non-baryonic cold dark matter. It is the latter form of unseen mass that is thought to dominate the mass budget of the universe and play a critical role in galaxy formation.

Cold Dark Matter

Cold dark matter is some form of slow moving, non-relativistic (‘cold’) particulate mass that is not composed of normal matter (baryons). Baryons are the family of particles that include protons and neutrons. As such, they compose the bulk of the mass of normal matter, and it has become conventional to use this term to distinguish between normal, baryonic matter and the non-baryonic dark matter.

The distinction between baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter is no small thing. Non-baryonic dark matter must be a new particle that resides in a new ‘dark sector’ that is completely distinct from the usual stable of elementary particles. We do not just need some new particle, we need one (or many) that reside in some sector beyond the framework of the stubbornly successful Standard Model of particle physics. Whatever the solution to the mass discrepancy problem turns out to be, it requires new physics.

The cosmic dark matter must be non-baryonic for two basic reasons. First, the mass density of the universe measured gravitationally (Ωm ​≈ ​0.3, e.g., Faber and Gallagher, 1979; Davis et al., 1980, 1992) clearly exceeds the mass density in baryons as constrained by BBN (Ωb ​≈ ​0.05, e.g., Walker et al., 1991). There is something gravitating that is not ordinary matter: Ωm ​> ​Ωb.

The second reason follows from the absence of large fluctuations in the CMB (Peebles and Yu, 1970; Silk, 1968; Sunyaev and Zeldovich, 1980). The CMB is extraordinarily uniform in temperature across the sky, varying by only ~ 1 part in 105 (Smoot et al., 1992). These small temperature variations correspond to variations in density. Gravity is an attractive force; it will make the rich grow richer. Small density excesses will tend to attract more mass, making them larger, attracting more mass, and leading to the formation of large scale structures, including galaxies. But gravity is also a weak force: this process takes a long time. In the long but finite age of the universe, gravity plus known baryonic matter does not suffice to go from the initially smooth, highly uniform state of the early universe to the highly clumpy, structured state of the local universe (Peebles, 1993). The solution is to boost the process with an additional component of mass — the cold dark matter — that gravitates without interacting with the photons, thus getting a head start on the growth of structure while not aggravating the amplitude of temperature fluctuations in the CMB.

Taken separately, one might argue away the need for dark matter. Taken together, these two distinct arguments convinced nearly everyone, including myself, of the absolute need for non-baryonic dark matter. Consequently, CDM became established as the leading paradigm during the 1980s (Peebles, 1984; Steigman and Turner, 1985). The paradigm has snowballed since that time, the common attitude among cosmologists being that CDM has to exist.

From an astronomical perspective, the CDM could be any slow-moving, massive object that does not interact with photons nor participate in BBN. The range of possibilities is at once limitless yet highly constrained. Neutrons would suffice if they were stable in vacuum, but they are not. Primordial black holes are a logical possibility, but if made of normal matter, they must somehow form in the first second after the Big Bang to not impair BBN. At this juncture, microlensing experiments have excluded most plausible mass ranges that primordial black holes could occupy (Mediavilla et al., 2017). It is easy to invent hypothetical dark matter candidates, but difficult for them to remain viable.

From a particle physics perspective, the favored candidate is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP: Peebles, 1984; Steigman and Turner, 1985). WIMPs are expected to be the lightest stable supersymmetric partner particle that resides in the hypothetical supersymmetric sector (Martin, 1998). The WIMP has been the odds-on favorite for so long that it is often used synonymously with the more generic term ‘dark matter.’ It is the hypothesized particle that launched a thousand experiments. Experimental searches for WIMPs have matured over the past several decades, making extraordinary progress in not detecting dark matter (Aprile et al., 2018). Virtually all of the parameter space in which WIMPs had been predicted to reside (Trotta et al., 2008) is now excluded. Worse, the existence of the supersymmetric sector itself, once seemingly a sure thing, remains entirely hypothetical, and appears at this juncture to be a beautiful idea that nature declined to implement.

In sum, we must have cold dark matter for both galaxies and cosmology, but we have as yet no clue to what it is.

* There is a trope that late in their careers, great scientists come to the opinion that everything worth discovering has been discovered, because they themselves already did everything worth doing. That is not a concern I have – I know we haven’t discovered all there is to discover. Yet I see no prospect for advancing our fundamental understanding simply because there aren’t enough of us pulling in the right direction. Most of the community is busy barking up the wrong tree, and refuses to be distracted from their focus on the invisible squirrel that isn’t there.

** Many of these people are the product of the toxic culture that Simon White warned us about. They wave the sausage of galaxy formation and feedback like a magic wand that excuses all faults while being proudly ignorant of how the sausage was made. Bitch, please. I was there when that sausage was made. I helped make the damn sausage. I know what went into it, and I recognize when it tastes wrong.

Galaxy models in compressed halos

Galaxy models in compressed halos

The last post was basically an introduction to this one, which is about the recent work of Pengfei Li. In order to test a theory, we need to establish its prior. What do we expect?

The prior for fully formed galaxies after 13 billion years of accretion and evolution is not an easy problem. The dark matter halos need to form first, with the baryonic component assembling afterwards. We know from dark matter-only structure formation simulations that the initial condition (A) of the dark matter halo should resemble an NFW halo, and from observations that the end product of baryonic assembly needs to look like a real galaxy (Z). How the universe gets from A to Z is a whole alphabet of complications.

The simplest thing we can do is ignore B-Y and combine a model galaxy with a model dark matter halo. The simplest model for a spiral galaxy is an exponential disk. True to its name, the azimuthally averaged stellar surface density falls off exponentially from a central value over some scale length. This is a tolerable approximation of the stellar disks of spiral galaxies, ignoring their central bulges and their gas content. It is an inadequate yet surprisingly decent starting point for describing gravitationally bound collections of hundreds of billions of stars with just two parameters.

So a basic galaxy model is an exponential disk in an NFW dark matter halo. This is they type of model I discussed in the last post, the kind I was considering two decades ago, and the kind of model still frequently considered. It is an obvious starting point. However, we know that this starting point is not adequate. On the baryonic side, we should model all the major mass components: bulge, disk, and gas. On the halo side, we need to understand how the initial halo depends on its assembly history and how it is modified by the formation of the luminous galaxy within it. The common approach to do all that is to run a giant cosmological simulation and watch what happens. That’s great, provided we know how to model all the essential physics. The action of gravity in an expanding universe we can compute well enough, but we do not enjoy the same ability to calculate the various non-gravitational effects of baryons.

Rather than blindly accept the outcome of simulations that have become so complicated that no one really seems to understand them, it helps to break the problem down into its basic steps. There is a lot going on, but what we’re concerned about here boils down to a tug of war between two competing effects: adiabatic compression tends to concentrate the dark matter, while feedback tends to redistribute it outwards.

Adiabatic compression refers to the response of the dark matter halo to infalling baryons. Though this name stuck, the process isn’t necessarily adiabatic, and the A-word word tends to blind people to a generic and inevitable physical process. As baryons condense into the centers of dark matter halos, the gravitational potential is non-stationary. The distribution of dark matter has to respond to this redistribution of mass: the infall of dissipating baryons drags some dark matter in with them, so we expect dark matter halos to become more centrally concentrated. The most common approach to computing this effect is to assume the process is adiabatic (hence the name). This means a gentle settling that is gradual enough to be time-reversible: you can imagine running the movie backwards, unlike a sudden, violent event like a car crash. It needn’t be rigorously adiabatic, but the compressive response of the halo is inevitable. Indeed, forming a thin, dynamically cold, well-organized rotating disk in a preferred plane – i.e., a spiral galaxy – pretty much requires a period during which the adiabatic assumption is a decent approximation. There is a history of screwing up even this much, but Jerry Sellwood showed that it could be done correctly and that when one does so, it reproduces the results of more expensive numerical simulations. This provides a method to go beyond a simple exponential disk in an NFW halo: we can compute what happens to an NFW halo in response to an observed mass distribution.

After infall and compression, baryons form stars that produce energy in the form of radiation, stellar winds, and the blast waves of supernova explosions. These are sources of energy that complicate what until now has been a straightforward calculation of gravitational dynamics. With sufficient coupling to the surrounding gas, these energy sources might be converted into enough kinetic energy to alter the equilibrium mass distribution and the corresponding gravitational potential. I say might because we don’t really know how this works, and it is a lot more complicated than I’ve made it sound. So let’s not go there, and instead just calculate the part we do know how to calculate. What happens from the inevitable adiabatic compression in the limit of zero feedback?

We have calculated this for a grid of model galaxies that matches the observed distribution or real galaxies. This is important; it often happens that people do not explore a realistic parameter space. Here is a plot of size against stellar mass:

The size of galaxy disks as measured by the exponential scale length as a function of stellar mass. Grey points are real galaxies; red circles are model galaxies with parameters chosen to cover the same parameter space. This, and all plots, from Li et al. (2022).

Note that at a given stellar mass, there is a wide range of sizes. This is an essential aspect of galaxy properties; one has to explain size variations as well as the trend with mass. This obvious point has been frequently forgotten and rediscovered in the literature.

The two parameter plot above only suffices to approximate the stellar disks of spiral and irregular galaxies. Real galaxies have bulges and interstellar gas. We include these in our models so that they cover the same distribution as real galaxies in terms of bulge mass, size, and gas fraction. We then assign a dark matter halo to each model galaxy using an abundance matching relation (the stellar mass tells us the halo mass) and adopt the cosmologically appropriate halo mass-concentration relation. These specify the initial condition of the NFW halo in which each model galaxy is presumed to reside.

At this point, it is worth remarking that there are a variety of abundance matching relations in the literature. Some of these give tragically bad predictions for the kinematics. I won’t delve into this here, but do want to note that in what follows, we have adopted the most favorable abundance matching relation, which turns out to be that of Kravstov et al. (2018). Note that this means that we are already engaged in a kind of fine-tuning by cherry-picking the most favorable relation.

Before considering adiabatic compression, let’s see what happens if we simply add our model galaxies to NFW halos. This is the same exercise we did last time with exponential disks; now we’re including bulges and gas:

Galaxy models in the RAR plane. Models are color coded by their stellar surface density. The dotted line is 1:1 (Newton with no dark matter or other funny business). The black line is the fit to the observed RAR.

This looks pretty good, at least at a first glance. Most of the models fall nearly on top of each other. This isn’t entirely true, as the most massive models overpredict the RAR. This is a generic consequence of the bend in abundance matching relations. This bend is mildest in the Kravtsov relation, which is what makes it “best” here – other relations, like the commonly cited one of Behroozi, predict a lot more high-acceleration models. One sees only a hint of that here.

The scatter is respectably small, mostly solving the problem I initially encountered in the nineties. Despite predicting a narrow relation, the models do have a finite scatter that is a bit more than we observe. This isn’t too tragic, so maybe we can work with it. These models also miss the low acceleration end of the relation by a modest but appreciable amount. This seems more significant, as we found the same thing for pure exponential models: it is hard to make this part of the problem go away.

Including bulges in the models extends them to high accelerations. This would seem to explain a region of the RAR that pure exponential models do not address. Bulges are high surface density, star dominated regions, so they fall on the 1:1 part of the RAR at high accelerations.

And then there are the hooks. These are obvious in the plot above. They occur in low and intermediate mass galaxies that lack a significant bulge component. A pure exponential disk has a peak acceleration at finite radius, but an NFW halo has its peak at zero radius. So if you imagine following a given model line inwards in radius, it goes up in acceleration until it reaches the maximum for the disk along the x-axis. The baryonic component of the acceleration then starts to decline while that due to the NFW halo continues to rise. The model doubles back to lower baryonic acceleration while continuing to higher total acceleration, making the little hook shape. This deviation from the RAR is not commonly observed; indeed, these hooks are the signature of the cusp-core problem in the RAR plane.

Results so far are mixed. With the “right” choice of abundance matching relation, we are well ahead of where we were at the turn of the century, but some real problems remain. We have yet to compute the necessary adiabatic contraction, so hopefully doing that right will result in further improvement. So let’s make a rigorous calculation of the compression that would result from forming a galaxy of the stipulated parameters.

Galaxy models in the RAR plane after compression.

Adiabatic compression makes things worse. There is a tiny improvement at low accelerations, but the most pronounced effects are at small radii where accelerations are large. Compression makes cuspy halos cuspier, making the hooks more pronounced. Worse, the strong concentration of starlight that is a bulge inevitably leads to strong compression. These models don’t approach the 1:1 line at high acceleration, and never can: higher acceleration means higher stellar surface density means greater compression. One cannot start from an NFW halo and ever reach a state of baryon domination; too much dark matter is always in the mix.

It helps to look at the residual diagram. The RAR is a log-log plot over a large dynamic range; this can hide small but significant deviations. For some reason, people who claim to explain the RAR with dark matter models never seem to show these residuals.

As above, with the observed RAR divided out. Model galaxies are mostly above the RAR. The cusp-core problem is exacerbated in disks, and bulges never reach the 1:1 line at high accelerations.

The models built to date don’t have the right shape to explain the RAR, at least when examined closely. Still, I’m pleased: what we’ve done here comes closer than all my many previous efforts, and most of the other efforts that are out there. Still, I wouldn’t claim it as a success. Indeed, the inevitable compressive effects that occur at high surface densities means that we can’t invoke simple offsets to accommodate the data: if a model gets the shape of the RAR right but the normalization wrong, it doesn’t work to simply shift it over.

So, where does that leave us? Up the proverbial creek? Perhaps. We have yet to consider feedback, which is too complicated to delve into here. Instead, while we haven’t engaged in any specific fine-tuning, we have already engaged in some cherry picking. First, we’ve abandoned the natural proportionality between halo and disk mass, replacing it with abundance matching. This is no small step, as it converts a single-valued parameter of our theory to a rolling function of mass. Abundance matching has become familiar enough that people seemed to be lulled into thinking this is natural. There is nothing natural about it. Regardless of how much fancy jargon we use to justify it, it’s still basically a rolling fudge factor – the scientific equivalent of a lipstick smothered pig.

Abundance matching does, at least, use data that are independent of the kinematics to set the relation between stellar and halo mass, and it does go in the right direction for the RAR. This only gets us into the right ballpark, and only if we cherry-pick the particular abundance matching relation that we use. So we’re well down the path of tuning whether we realize it or not. Invoking feedback is simply another step along this path.

Feedback is usually invoked in the kinematic context to convert cusps into cores. That could help with the hooks. This kind of feedback is widely thought to affect low and intermediate mass galaxies, or galaxies of a particular stellar to halo mass ratio. Opinions vary a bit, but it is generally not thought to have such a strong effect on massive galaxies. And yet, we find that we need some (second?) kind of feedback for them, as we need to move bulges back onto the 1:1 line in the RAR plane. That’s perhaps related to the cusp-core problem, but it’s also different. Getting bulges right requires a fine-tuned amount of feedback to exactly cancel out the effects of compression. A third distinct place where the models need some help is at low accelerations. This is far from the region where feedback is thought to have much effect at all.

I could go on, and perhaps will in a future post. Point is, we’ve been tuning our feedback prescriptions to match observed facts about galaxies, not computing how we think it really works. We don’t know how to do the latter, and there is no guarantee that our approximations do justice to reality. So on the one hand, I don’t doubt that with enough tinkering this process can be made to work in a model. On the other hand, I do question whether this is how the universe really works.

What should we expect for the radial acceleration relation?

What should we expect for the radial acceleration relation?

In the previous post, I related some of the history of the Radial Acceleration Relation (henceforth RAR). Here I’ll discuss some of my efforts to understand it. I’ve spent more time trying to do this in terms of dark matter than pretty much anything else, but I have not published most of those efforts. As I related briefly in this review, that’s because most of the models I’ve considered are obviously wrong. Just because I have refrained from publishing explanations of the RAR that are manifestly incorrect has not precluded others from doing so.

A theory is only as good as its prior. If a theory makes a clear prediction, preferably ahead of time, then we can test it. If it has not done so ahead of time, that’s still OK, if we can work out what it would have predicted without being guided by the data. A good historical example of this is the explanation of the excess perihelion precession of Mercury provided by General Relativity. The anomaly had been known for decades, but the right answer falls out of the theory without input from the data. A more recent example is our prediction of the velocity dispersions of the dwarf satellites of Andromeda. Some cases were genuine a priori predictions, but even in the cases that weren’t, the prediction is what it is irrespective of the measurement.

Dark matter-based explanations of the RAR do not fall in either category. They have always chased the data and been informed by it. This has been going on for so long that new practitioners have entered field unaware of the extent to which the simulations they inherited had already been informed by the data. They legitimately seem to think that there has been no fine-tuning of the models because they weren’t personally present for every turn of the knob.

So let’s set the way-back machine. I became concerned about fine-tuning problems in the context of galaxy dynamics when I was trying to explain the Tully-Fisher relation of low surface brightness galaxies in the mid-1990s. This was before I was more than dimly aware that MOND existed, much less taken it seriously. Many of us were making earnest efforts to build proper galaxy formation theories at the time (e.g., Mo, McGaugh, & Bothun 1994, Dalcanton, Spergel, & Summers 1997; Mo, Mao, & White 1998 [MMW]; McGaugh & de Blok 1998), though of course these were themselves informed by observations to date. My own paper had started as an effort to exploit the new things we had discovered about low surface brightness galaxies to broaden our conventional theory of galaxy formation, but over the course of several years, turned into a falsification of some of the ideas I had considered in my 1992 thesis. Dalcanton’s model evolved from one that predicted a shift in Tully-Fisher (as mine had) to one that did not (after the data said no). It may never be possible to completely separate theoretical prediction from concurrent data, but it is possible to ask what a theory plausibly predicts. What is the LCDM prior for the RAR?

In order to do this, we need to predict both the baryon distribution (gbar) and that of the dark matter (gobs-gbar). Unfortunately, nobody seems to really agree on what LCDM predicts for galaxies. There seems to be a general consensus that dark matter halos should start out with the NFW form, but opinions vary widely about whether and how this is modified during galaxy formation. The baryonic side of the issue is simply seen as a problem.

That there is no clear prediction is in itself a problem. I distinctly remember expressing my concerns to Martin Rees while I was still a postdoc. He said not to worry; galaxies were such non-linear entities that we shouldn’t be surprised by anything they do. This verbal invocation of a blanket dodge for any conceivable observation did not inspire confidence. Since then, I’ve heard that excuse repeated by others. I have lost count of the number of more serious, genuine, yet completely distinct LCDM predictions I have seen, heard, or made myself. Many dozens, at a minimum; perhaps hundreds at this point. Some seem like they might work but don’t while others don’t even cross the threshold of predicting both axes of the RAR. There is no coherent picture that adds up to an agreed set of falsifiable predictions. Individual models can be excluded, but not the underlying theory.

To give one example, let’s consider the specific model of MMW. I make this choice here for two reasons. One, it is a credible effort by serious workers and has become a touchstone in the field, to the point that a sizeable plurality of practitioners might recognize it as a plausible prior – i.e., the closest thing we can hope to get to a legitimate, testable prior. Two, I recently came across one of my many unpublished attempts to explain the RAR which happens to make use of it. Unix says that the last time I touched these files was nearly 22 years ago, in 2000. The postscript generated then is illegible now, so I have to update the plot:

The prediction of MMW (lines) compared to data (points). Each colored line represents a model galaxy of a given mass. Different lines of the same color represent models with different disk scale lengths, as galaxies of the same mass exist over a range of sizes. Models are only depicted over the range of radii typically observed in real galaxies.

At first glance, this might look OK. The trend is at least in the right direction. This is not a success so much as it is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the observed acceleration includes the contribution of the baryons. The area below the dashed line is excluded, as it is impossible to have gobs < gbar. Moreover, since gobs = gbar+gDM, some correlation in this plane is inevitable. Quite a lot, if baryons dominate, as they always seem to do at high accelerations. Not that these models explain the high acceleration part of the RAR, but I’ll leave that detail for later. For now, note that this is a log-log plot. That the models miss the data a little to the eye translates to a large quantitative error. Individual model galaxies sometimes fall too high, sometimes too low: the model predicts considerably more scatter than is observed. The RAR is not predicted to be a narrow relation, but one with lots of scatter with large intrinsic deviations from the mean. That’s the natural prediction of MMW-type models.

I have explored many flavors of [L]CDM models. They generically predicts more scatter in the RAR than is observed. This is the natural expectation, and some fine-tuning has to be done to reduce the scatter to the observed level. The inevitable need for fine-tuning is why I became concerned for the dark matter paradigm, even before I became aware that MOND predicted exactly this. It is also why the observed RAR was considered to be against orthodoxy at the time: everybody’s prior was for a large scatter. It wasn’t just me.

In order to build a model, one has to make some assumptions. The obvious assumption to make, at the time, was a constant ratio of dark matter to baryons. Indeed, for many years, the working assumption was that this was about 10:1, maybe 20:1. This type of assumption is built into the models of MMW, who thought that they worked provided “(i) the masses of disks are a few percent of those of their haloes”. The (i) is there because it is literally their first point, and the assumption that everybody made. We were terrified of dropping this natural assumption, as the obvious danger is that it becomes a rolling fudge factor, assuming any value that is convenient for explaining any given observation.

Unfortunately, it had already become clear by this time from the data that a constant ratio of dark to luminous matter could not work. The earliest I said this on the record is 1996. [That was before LCDM had supplanted SCDM as the most favored cosmology. From that perspective, the low baryon fractions of galaxies seemed natural; it was clusters of galaxies that were weird.] I pointed out the likely failure of (i) to Mo when I first saw a draft of MMW (we had been office mates in Cambridge). I’ve written various papers about it since. The point here is that, from the perspective of the kinematic data, the ratio of dark to luminous mass has to vary. It cannot be a constant as we had all assumed. But it has to vary in a way that doesn’t introduce scatter into relations like the RAR or the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, so we have to fine-tune this rolling fudge factor so that it varies with mass but always obtains the same value at the same mass.

A constant ratio of dark to luminous mass wasn’t just a convenient assumption. There is good physical reason to expect that this should be the case. The baryons in galaxies have to cool and dissipate to form a galaxy in the center of a dark matter halo. This takes time, imposing an upper limit on galaxy mass. But the baryons in small galaxies have ample time to cool and condense, so one naively expects that they should all do so. That would have been natural. It would also lead to a steeply increasing luminosity function, which is not observed, leading to the over-cooling and missing satellite problems.

Reconciling the observed and predicted mass functions is one of the reasons we invoke feedback. The energy produced by the stars that form in the first gas to condense are an energy source that feeds back into the surrounding gas. This can, in principle, reheat the remaining gas or expel it entirely, thereby precluding it from condensing and forming more stars as in the naive expectation. In principle. In practice, we don’t know how this works, or even if the energy provided by star formation couples to the surrounding gas in a way that does what we need it to do. Simulations do not have the resolution to follow feedback in detail, so instead make some assumptions (“subgrid physics”) about how this might happen, and tune the assumed prescription to fit some aspect of the data. Once this is done, it is possible to make legitimate predictions about other aspects of the data, provided they are unrelated. But we still don’t know if that’s how feedback works, and in no way is it natural. Rather, it is a deus ex machina that we invoke to save us from a glaring problem without really knowing how it works or even if it does. This is basically just theoretical hand-waving in the computational age.

People have been invoking feedback as a panacea for all ills in galaxy formation theory for so long that it has become familiar. Once something becomes familiar, everybody knows it. Since everybody knows that feedback has to play some role, it starts to seem like it was always expected. This is easily confused with being natural.

I could rant about the difficulty of making predictions with feedback afflicted models, but never mind the details. Let’s find some aspect of the data that is independent of the kinematics that we can use to specify the dark to luminous mass ratio. The most obvious candidate is abundance matching, in which the number density of observed galaxies is matched to the predicted number density of dark matter halos. We don’t have to believe feedback-based explanations to apply this, we merely have to accept that there is some mechanism to make the dark to luminous mass ratio variable. Whatever it is that makes this happen had better predict the right thing for both the mass function and the kinematics.

When it comes to the RAR, the application of abundance matching to assign halo masses to observed galaxies works out much better than the natural assumption of a constant ratio. This was first pointed out by Di Cintio & Lelli (2016), which inspired me to consider appropriately modified models. All I had to do was update the relation between stellar and halo mass from a constant ratio to a variable specified by abundance matching. This gives rather better results:

A model like that from 2000 but updated by assigning halo masses using an abundance matching relation.

This looks considerably better! The predicted scatter is much lower. How is this accomplished?

Abundance matching results in a non-linear relation bewteen stellar mass and halo mass. For the RAR, the scatter is reduced by narrowing the dynamic range of halo masses relative to the observed stellar masses. There is less variation in gDM. Empirically, this is what needs to happen – to a crude first approximation, the data are roughly consistent with all galaxies living in the same halo – i.e., no variation in halo mass with stellar mass. This was already known before abundance matching became rife; both the kinematic data and the mass function push us in this direction. There’s nothing natural about any of this; it’s just what we need to do to accommodate the data.

Still, it is tempting to say that we’ve succeeded in explaining the RAR. Indeed, some people have built the same kind of models to claim exactly this. While matters are clearly better, really we’re just less far off. By reducing the dynamic range in halo masses that are occupied by galaxies, the partial contribution of gDM to the gobs axis is compressed, and model lines perforce fall closer together. There’s less to distinguish an L* galaxy from a dwarf galaxy in this plane.

Nevertheless, there’s still too much scatter in the models. Harry Desmond made a specific study of this, finding that abundance matching “significantly overpredicts the scatter in the relation and its normalisation at low acceleration”, which is exactly what I’ve been saying. The offset in the normalization at low acceleration is obvious from inspection in the figure above: the models overshoot the low acceleration data. This led Navarro et al. to argue that there was a second acceleration scale, “an effective minimum acceleration probed by kinematic tracers in isolated galaxies” a little above 10-11 m/s/s. The models do indeed do this, over a modest range in gbar, and there is some evidence for it in some data. This does not persist in the more reliable data; those shown above are dominated by atomic gas so there isn’t even the systematic uncertainty of the stellar mass-to-light ratio to save us.

The astute observer will notice some pink model lines that fall well above the RAR in the plot above. These are for the most massive galaxies, those with luminosities in excess of L*. Below the knee in the Schechter function, there is a small range of halo masses for a given range of stellar masses. Above the knee, this situation is reversed. Consequently, the nonlinearity of abundance matching works against us instead of for us, and the scatter explodes. One can suppress this with an apt choice of abundance matching relation, but we shouldn’t get to pick and choose which relation we use. It can be made to work only because there remains enough uncertainty in abundance matching to select the “right” one. There is nothing natural about any this.

There are also these little hooks, the kinks at the high acceleration end of the models. I’ve mostly suppressed them here (as did Navarro et al.) but they’re there in the models if one plots to small enough radii. This is the signature of the cusp-core problem in the RAR plane. The hooks occur because the exponential disk model has a maximum acceleration at a finite radius that is a little under one scale length; this marks the maximum value that such a model can reach in gbar. In contrast, the acceleration gDM of an NFW halo continues to increase all the way to zero radius. Consequently, the predicted gobs continues to increase even after gbar has peaked and starts to decline again. This leads to little hook-shaped loops at the high acceleration end of the models in the RAR plane.

These hooks were going to be the segue to discuss more sophisticated models built by Pengfei Li, but that’s going to be a whole ‘nother post because these are quite enough words for now. So, until next time, don’t invest in bitcoins, Russian oil, or LCDM models that claim to explain the RAR.

The curious case of AGC 114905: an isolated galaxy devoid of dark matter?

The curious case of AGC 114905: an isolated galaxy devoid of dark matter?

It’s early in the new year, so what better time to violate my own resolutions? I prefer to be forward-looking and not argue over petty details, or chase wayward butterflies. But sometimes the devil is in the details, and the occasional butterfly can be entertaining if distracting. Today’s butterfly is the galaxy AGC 114905, which has recently been in the news.

There are a couple of bandwagons here: one to rebrand very low surface brightness galaxies as ultradiffuse, and another to get overly excited when these types of galaxies appear to lack dark matter. The nomenclature is terrible, but that’s normal for astronomy so I would overlook it, except that in this case it gives the impression that there is some new population of galaxies behaving in an unexpected fashion, when instead it looks to me like the opposite is the case. The extent to which there are galaxies lacking dark matter is fundamental to our interpretation of the acceleration discrepancy (aka the missing mass problem), so bears closer scrutiny. The evidence for galaxies devoid of dark matter is considerably weaker than the current bandwagon portrays.

If it were just one butterfly (e.g., NGC 1052-DF2), I wouldn’t bother. Indeed, it was that specific case that made me resolve to ignore such distractions as a waste of time. I’ve seen this movie literally hundreds of times, I know how it goes:

  • Observations of this one galaxy falsify MOND!
  • Hmm, doing the calculation right, that’s what MOND predicts.
  • OK, but better data shrink the error bars and now MOND falsified.
  • Are you sure about…?
  • Yes. We like this answer, let’s stop thinking about it now.
  • As the data continue to improve, it approaches what MOND predicts.
  • <crickets>

Over and over again. DF44 is another example that has followed this trajectory, and there are many others. This common story is not widely known – people lose interest once they get the answer they want. Irrespective of whether we can explain this weird case or that, there is a deeper story here about data analysis and interpretation that seems not to be widely appreciated.

My own experience inevitably colors my attitude about this, as it does for us all, so let’s start thirty years ago when I was writing a dissertation on low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies. I did many things in my thesis, most of them well. One of the things I tried to do then was derive rotation curves for some LSB galaxies. This was not the main point of the thesis, and arose almost as an afterthought. It was also not successful, and I did not publish the results because I didn’t believe them. It wasn’t until a few years later, with improved data, analysis software, and the concerted efforts of Erwin de Blok, that we started to get a handle on things.

The thing that really bugged me at the time was not the Doppler measurements, but the inclinations. One has to correct the observed velocities by the inclination of the disk, 1/sin(i). The inclination can be constrained by the shape of the image and by the variation of velocities across the face of the disk. LSB galaxies presented raggedy images and messy velocity fields. I found it nigh on impossible to constrain their inclinations at the time, and it remains a frequent struggle to this day.

Here is an example of the LSB galaxy F577-V1 that I find lurking around on disk from all those years ago:

The LSB galaxy F577-V1 (B-band image, left) and the run of the eccentricity of ellipses fit to the atomic gas data (right).

A uniform disk projected on the sky at some inclination will have a fixed corresponding eccentricity, with zero being the limit of a circular disk seen perfectly face-on (i = 0). Do you see a constant value of the eccentricity in the graph above? If you say yes, go get your eyes checked.

What we see in this case is a big transition from a fairly eccentric disk to one that is more nearly face on. The inclination doesn’t have a sudden warp; the problem is that the assumption of a uniform disk is invalid. This galaxy has a bar – a quasi-linear feature that is common in many spiral galaxies that is supported by non-circular orbits. Even face-on, the bar will look elongated simply because it is. Indeed, the sudden change in eccentricity is one way to define the end of the bar, which the human eye-brain can do easily by looking at the image. So in a case like this, one might adopt the inclination from the outer points, and that might even be correct. But note that there are spiral arms along the outer edge that is visible to the eye, so it isn’t clear that even these isophotes are representative of the shape of the underlying disk. Worse, we don’t know what happens beyond the edge of the data; the shape might settle down at some other level that we can’t see.

This was so frustrating, I swore never to have anything to do with galaxy kinematics ever again. Over 50 papers on the subject later, all I can say is D’oh! Repeatedly.

Bars are rare in LSB galaxies, but it struck me as odd that we saw any at all. We discovered unexpectedly that they were dark matter dominated – the inferred dark halo outweighs the disk, even within the edge defined by the stars – but that meant that the disks should be stable against the formation of bars. My colleague Chris Mihos agreed, and decided to look into it. The answer was yes, LSB galaxies should be stable against bar formation, at least internally generated bars. Sometimes bars are driven by external perturbations, so we decided to simulate the close passage of a galaxy of similar mass – basically, whack it real hard and see what happens:

Simulation of an LSB galaxy during a strong tidal encounter with another galaxy. Closest approach is at t=24 in simulation units (between the first and second box). A linear bar does not form, but the model galaxy does suffer a strong and persistent oval distortion: all these images are shown face-on (i=0). From Mihos et al (1997).

This was a conventional simulation, with a dark matter halo constructed to be consistent with the observed properties of the LSB galaxy UGC 128. The results are not specific to this case; it merely provides numerical corroboration of the more general case that we showed analytically.

Consider the image above in the context of determining galaxy inclinations from isophotal shapes. We know this object is face-on because we can control our viewing angle in the simulation. However, we would not infer i=0 from this image. If we didn’t know it had been perturbed, we would happily infer a substantial inclination – in this case, easily as much as 60 degrees! This is an intentionally extreme case, but it illustrates how a small departure from a purely circular shape can be misinterpreted as an inclination. This is a systematic error, and one that usually makes the inclination larger than it is: it is possible to appear oval when face-on, but it is not possible to appear more face-on than perfectly circular.

Around the same time, Erwin and I were making fits to the LSB galaxy data – with both dark matter halos and MOND. By this point in my career, I had deeply internalized that the data for LSB galaxies were never perfect. So we sweated every detail, and worked through every “what if?” This was a particularly onerous task for the dark matter fits, which could do many different things if this or that were assumed – we discussed all the plausible possibilities at the time. (Subsequently, a rich literature sprang up discussing many unreasonable possibilities.) By comparison, the MOND fits were easy. They had fewer knobs, and in 2/3 of the cases they simply worked, no muss, no fuss.

For the other 1/3 of the cases, we noticed that the shape of the MOND-predicted rotation curves was usually right, but the amplitude was off. How could it work so often, and yet miss in this weird way? That sounded like a systematic error, and the inclination was the most obvious culprit, with 1/sin(i) making a big difference for small inclinations. So we decided to allow this as a fit parameter, to see whether a fit could be obtained, and judge how [un]reasonable this was. Here is an example for two galaxies:

UGC 1230 (left) and UGC 5005 (right). Ovals show the nominally measured inclination (i=22o for UGC 1230 and 41o for UGC 5005, respectively) and the MOND best-fit value (i=17o and 30o). From de Blok & McGaugh (1998).

The case of UGC 1230 is memorable to me because it had a good rotation curve, despite being more face-on than widely considered acceptable for analysis. And for good reason: the difference between 22 and 17 degrees make a huge difference to the fit, changing it from way off to picture perfect.

Rotation curve fits for UGC 1230 (top) and UGC 5005 (bottom) with the inclination fixed (left) and fit (right). From de Blok & McGaugh (1998).

What I took away from this exercise is how hard it is to tell the difference between inclination values for relatively face-on galaxies. UGC 1230 is obvious: the ovals for the two inclinations are practically on top of each other. The difference in the case of UGC 5005 is more pronounced, but look at the galaxy. The shape of the outer isophote where we’re trying to measure this is raggedy as all get out; this is par for the course for LSB galaxies. Worse, look further in – this galaxy has a bar! The central bar is almost orthogonal to the kinematic major axis. If we hadn’t observed as deeply as we had, we’d think the minor axis was the major axis, and the inclination was something even higher.

I remember Erwin quipping that he should write a paper on how to use MOND to determine inclinations. This was a joke between us, but only half so: using the procedure in this way would be analogous to using Tully-Fisher to measure distances. We would simply be applying an empirically established procedure to constrain a property of a galaxy – luminosity from line-width in that case of Tully-Fisher; inclination from rotation curve shape here. That we don’t understand why this works has never stopped astronomers before.

Systematic errors in inclination happen all the time. Big surveys don’t have time to image deeply – they have too much sky area to cover – and if there is follow-up about the gas content, it inevitably comes in the form of a single dish HI measurement. This is fine; it is what we can do en masse. But an unresolved single dish measurement provides no information about the inclination, only a pre-inclination line-width (which itself is a crude proxy for the flat rotation speed). The inclination we have to take from the optical image, which would key on the easily detected, high surface brightness central region of the image. That’s the part that is most likely to show a bar-like distortion, so one can expect lots of systematic errors in the inclinations determined in this way. I provided a long yet still incomplete discussion of these issues in McGaugh (2012). This is both technical and intensely boring, so not even the pros read it.

This brings us to the case of AGC 114905, which is part of a sample of ultradiffuse galaxies discussed previously by some of the same authors. On that occasion, I kept to the code, and refrained from discussion. But for context, here are those data on a recent Baryonic Tully-Fisher plot. Spoiler alert: that post was about a different sample of galaxies that seemed to be off the relation but weren’t.

Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation showing the ultradiffuse galaxies discussed by Mancera Piña et al. (2019) as gray circles. These are all outliers from the relation; AGC 114905 is highlighted in orange. Placing much meaning in the outliers is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. The outliers are trees. The Tully-Fisher relation is the forest.

On the face of it, these ultradiffuse galaxies (UDGs) are all very serious outliers. This is weird – they’re not some scatter off to one side, they’re just way off on their own island, with no apparent connection to the rest of established reality. By calling them a new name, UDG, it makes it sound plausible that these are some entirely novel population of galaxies that behave in a new way. But they’re not. They are exactly the same kinds of galaxies I’ve been talking about. They’re all blue, gas rich, low surface brightness, fairly isolated galaxies – all words that I’ve frequently used to describe my thesis sample. These UDGs are all a few billion solar mass is baryonic mass, very similar to F577-V1 above. You could give F577-V1 a different name, slip into the sample, and nobody would notice that it wasn’t like one of the others.

The one slight difference is implied by the name: UDGs are a little lower in surface brightness. Indeed, once filter transformations are taken into account, the definition of ultradiffuse is equal to what I arbitrarily called very low surface brightness in 1996. Most of my old LSB sample galaxies have central stellar surface brightnesses at or a bit above 10 solar masses per square parsec while the UDGs here are a bit under this threshold. For comparison, in typical high surface brightness galaxies this quantity is many hundreds, often around a thousand. Nothing magic happens at the threshold of 10 solar masses per square parsec, so this line of definition between LSB and UDG is an observational distinction without a physical difference. So what are the odds of a different result for the same kind of galaxies?

Indeed, what really matters is the baryonic surface density, not just the stellar surface brightness. A galaxy made purely of gas but no stars would have zero optical surface brightness. I don’t know of any examples of that extreme, but we came close to it with the gas rich sample of Trachternach et al. (2009) when we tried this exact same exercise a decade ago. Despite selecting that sample to maximize the chance of deviations from the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, we found none – at least none that were credible: there were deviant cases, but their data were terrible. There were no deviants among the better data. This sample is comparable or even extreme than the UDGs in terms of baryonic surface density, so the UDGs can’t be exception because they’re a genuinely new population, whatever name we call them by.

The key thing is the credibility of the data, so let’s consider the data for AGC 114905. The kinematics are pretty well ordered; the velocity field is well observed for this kind of beast. It ought to be; they invested over 40 hours of JVLA time into this one galaxy. That’s more than went into my entire LSB thesis sample. The authors are all capable, competent people. I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, per se. But they do seem to have climbed aboard the bandwagon of dark matter-free UDGs, and have talked themselves into believing smaller error bars on the inclination than I am persuaded is warranted.

Here is the picture of AGC 114905 from Mancera Piña et al. (2021):

AGC 114905 in stars (left) and gas (right). The contours of the gas distribution are shown on top of the stars in white. Figure 1 from Mancera Piña et al. (2021).

This messy morphology is typical of very low surface brightness galaxies – hence their frequent classification as Irregular galaxies. Though messier, it shares some morphological traits with the LSB galaxies shown above. The central light distribution is elongated with a major axis that is not aligned with that of the gas. The gas is raggedy as all get out. The contours are somewhat boxy; this is a hint that something hinky is going on beyond circular motion in a tilted axisymmetric disk.

The authors do the right thing and worry about the inclination, checking to see what it would take to be consistent with either LCDM or MOND, which is about i=11o in stead of the 30o indicated by the shape of the outer isophote. They even build a model to check the plausibility of the smaller inclination:

Contours of models of disks with different inclinations (lines, as labeled) compared to the outer contour of the gas distribution of AGC 114905. Figure 7 from Mancera Piña et al. (2021).

Clearly the black line (i=30o) is a better fit to the shape of the gas distribution than the blue dashed line (i=11o). Consequently, they “find it unlikely that we are severely overestimating the inclination of our UDG, although this remains the largest source of uncertainty in our analysis.” I certainly agree with the latter phrase, but not the former. I think it is quite likely that they are overestimating the inclination. I wouldn’t even call it a severe overestimation; more like par for the course with this kind of object.

As I have emphasized above and elsewhere, there are many things that can go wrong in this sort of analysis. But if I were to try to put my finger on the most important thing, here it would be the inclination. The modeling exercise is good, but it assumes “razor-thin axisymmetric discs.” That’s a reasonable thing to do when building such a model, but we have to bear in mind that real disks are neither. The thickness of the disk probably doesn’t matter too much for a nearly face-on case like this, but the assumption of axisymmetry is extraordinarily dubious for an Irregular galaxy. That’s how they got the name.

It is hard to build models that are not axisymmetric. Once you drop this simplifying assumption, where do you even start? So I don’t fault them for stopping at this juncture, but I can also imagine doing as de Blok suggested, using MOND to set the inclination. Then one could build models with asymmetric features by trial and error until a match is obtained. Would we know that such a model would be a better representation of reality? No. Could we exclude such a model? Also no. So the bottom line is that I am not convinced that the uncertainty in the inclination is anywhere near as small as the adopted ±3o.

That’s very deep in the devilish details. If one is worried about a particular result, one can back off and ask if it makes sense in the context of what we already know. I’ve illustrated this process previously. First, check the empirical facts. Every other galaxy in the universe with credible data falls on the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, including very similar galaxies that go by a slightly different name. Hmm, strike one. Second, check what we expect from theory. I’m not a fan of theory-informed data interpretation, but we know that LCDM, unlike SCDM before it, at least gets the amplitude of the rotation speed in the right ballpark (Vflat ~ V200). Except here. Strike two. As much as we might favor LCDM as the standard cosmology, it has now been extraordinarily well established that MOND has considerable success in not just explaining but predicting these kind of data, with literally hundreds of examples. One hundred was the threshold Vera Rubin obtained to refute excuses made to explain away the first few flat rotation curves. We’ve crossed that threshold: MOND phenomenology is as well established now as flat rotation curves were at the inception of the dark matter paradigm. So while I’m open to alternative explanations for the MOND phenomenology, seeing that a few trees stand out from the forest is never going to be as important as the forest itself.

The Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation exists empirically; we have to explain it in any theory. Either we explain it, or we don’t. We can’t have it both ways, just conveniently throwing away our explanation to accommodate any discrepant observation that comes along. That’s what we’d have to do here: if we can explain the relation, we can’t very well explain the outliers. If we explain the outliers, it trashes our explanation for the relation. If some galaxies are genuine exceptions, then there are probably exceptional reasons for them to be exceptions, like a departure from equilibrium. That can happen in any theory, rendering such a test moot: a basic tenet of objectivity is that we don’t get to blame a missed prediction of LCDM on departures from equilibrium without considering the same possibility for MOND.

This brings us to a physical effect that people should be aware of. We touched on the bar stability above, and how a galaxy might look oval even when seen face on. This happens fairly naturally in MOND simulations of isolated disk galaxies. They form bars and spirals and their outer parts wobble about. See, for example, this simulation by Nils Wittenburg. This particular example is a relatively massive galaxy; the lopsidedness reminds me of M101 (Watkins et al. 2017). Lower mass galaxies deeper in the MOND regime are likely even more wobbly. This happens because disks are only marginally stable in MOND, not the over-stabilized entities that have to be hammered to show a response as in our early simulation of UGC 128 above. The point is that there is good reason to expect even isolated face-on dwarf Irregulars to look, well, irregular, leading to exactly the issues with inclination determinations discussed above. Rather than being a contradiction to MOND, AGC 114905 may illustrate one of its inevitable consequences.

I don’t like to bicker at this level of detail, but it makes a profound difference to the interpretation. I do think we should be skeptical of results that contradict well established observational reality – especially when over-hyped. God knows I was skeptical of our own results, which initially surprised the bejeepers out of me, but have been repeatedly corroborated by subsequent observations.

I guess I’m old now, so I wonder how I come across to younger practitioners; perhaps as some scary undead monster. But mates, these claims about UDGs deviating from established scaling relations are off the edge of the map.