Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Dark Matter Has a Problem. So Does MOND.

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

For 50 years I taught my students that dark matter surrounds the Milky Way in a giant halo, or that Newton’s laws break down at low accelerations. The Gaia satellite just measured something that makes both of those answers uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Gaia has measured over a billion stars. What its third data release shows is that the outer rotation curve of our own galaxy appears to decline in a Keplerian fashion. That should not happen if a dark matter halo is doing what we think it does. It also should not happen if MOND is right, because MOND produces flat curves for isolated galaxies. Both camps predicted something flatter. Neither got it. I walk you through the physics from Kepler to Vera Rubin to Gaia DR3, show you why systematic errors from asymmetric drift, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy matter enormously before anyone draws a conclusion, and lay out the three scenarios that still survive. The most interesting question here is not which side lost. It is why both sides were expecting the wrong curve from our own galaxy. What you’ll hear: -Why the neutrino technically counts as dark matter and why that still leaves most of the problem unsolved -What Kepler’s first law of fatherhood has to do with galactic dynamics -Why Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom might be celebrating too soon -What Cepheids, stellar streams, and globular clusters could tell us that Gaia cannot -Whether the Milky Way is too messy to ever give us a clean answer “The question is not which camp won, but why we were both expecting the wrong curve.” — Brian Keating CHAPTERS 00:00 Two solutions. One problem. Neither wins. 02:12 What Vera Rubin actually found 03:18 We're inside the galaxy. That's the problem. 04:24 The asymmetric drift problem 05:04 What Gaia DR3 actually shows 06:34 Why the mass estimate is model-dependent 08:04 MOND: no radius, no problem. Until now. 08:56 Gaia may be saying both sides are wrong 09:24 Flaws lead to new laws 10:22 LMC, Sagittarius, and the galactic warp 12:28 Three viable explanations 12:42 Dark matter adjusts. MOND adjusts. But is that enough? 13:14 What could settle this 14:04 Are we expecting the wrong curve? Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Related episodes: Stacy McGaugh episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnpyFk2WlME My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #darkmatter #MOND #MilkyWay #cosmology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #physics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 50 years, Dark Matter explained why galaxies spin too fast. Its rival, Mond, explained the same thing with no new particles at all. New data from a European spacecraft suggests both of them predicted the wrong curve. I'm Brian Keating. I built telescopes that mapped the early universe and monitored distant astronomical objects for signs of cracks and relativity. 400 years ago, Johannes Kepler worked out how fast a planet should orbit. The farther out you go, the slower it moves.

Galaxies refuse to do that. Dark matter was one answer. Modifying Newton's equations was the other. Then Gaia measured a billion stars in our own galaxy, and the number it got back was the one nobody expected. So, start with Kepler. The solar system gave him the familiar picture. Mercury moves much faster than Earth, and Earth moves much faster than Jupiter. Neptune moves at the urgency of a teenager that you've asked to empty the dishwasher. The farther away you get from the sun, the slower it orbits.

Not directly proportional, but actually proportional to one over the square root of the radius from the sun. Good old Johannes worked us out over four centuries ago. Now, Kepler had three laws. For a circular orbit, which most of the planets nearly follow, the speed that the planet orbits is determined by the gravitating matter enclosed within that orbit. In fact, the equation is circular speed squared equals Newton's constant times the enclosed mass divided by a radius. Newton actually proved mathematically why Kepler's laws are correct.

Measure an orbital speed, and after assuming a geometry, basically circular, you can infer the gravitational force that's pulling on the orbiting planet. If the enclosed mass within the orbital radius stops increasing, the radius in the denominator keeps growing, but the numerator stays nearly fixed. Therefore, the speed must fall. Now let's replace the Sun with a galaxy containing only its visible gas and stars. Far outside the bright disk, almost all of that barionic mass is entirely enclosed. The mass term becomes approximately constant, so the predicted velocity falls off like 1 over

the square root of radius. And we've seen that far, far out in many galaxies. Now, here in the slide, the gray curve is the visible matter only prediction. If galaxies behave like in large solar systems with all of the mass essentially being at the center, that would be the end of the story. The universe, though, has other plans, and a larger budget for the invisible accounting in the dark matter seems to require. What astronomers actually found, dating back to Vera Rubin and her collaborators, was the

blue curve. The outer velocity remains approximately constant. And if circular speeds constant while radius increases, the enclosed gravitating mass must increasing in roughly proportion to the radius. The luminosity of the galaxy fades away, but the gravitational influence does not. And that mismatch is one of the clearest reasons dark matter became central to modern astrophysics. It's not the only reason, and it's not merely that galaxy's spin too fast, it's that their radial pattern of motion implies more gravitating mass at larger radii than the visible mass can provide.

Flat rotation curves map where the missing gravity appears to live. The standard explanation surrounds the visible disc with a much larger dark matter halo. The halo contributes little light, but it keeps adding enclosed mass as we move outward. Combine the disc with the halo and the rotation curve can remain essentially flat. That's what it was observed. So where is the extra gravity coming from? These questions are not exactly identical, but there is some commonality between them, and the rotation curve addresses the second one, the extra gravity.

Now measuring our galaxy has one disadvantage. We're inside of it. This beach ball shows the perspective of God outside of it, but we're inside of it looking out. So it's like trying to infer the shape of a football stadium from inside the bleachers. Guy gave us these exquisite measurements of stellar positions and their motions. But Guy doesn't provide a button labeled the true Milky Way rotation curve. Click here. That was easy. So we have to begin with proxies.

We measure stellar positions and their velocities. We correct for their distances. It's really good guys capable of doing that. We have to choose a model and correct for the asymmetric drift of stars that add peculiar. peculiar effects. And we have to assume something about the equilibrium and symmetry of the physics of the problem. And then we can correct for a circular velocity and any biases that we may have induced. The instrument Gaia provides the data and the pipeline tells us what we think those data points meet. Revolutionary claims need us to keep those chapters

together. And one of the most important things is that stars do not travel on perfectly circular tracks, just like planets. They're not perfectly ellipticity-free, but they also have wobbles. They wobble radially and virgin, And steller populations average as a mutual speed is therefore lower than the circular speed of the gravitational field. That difference is called by professional astronomers asymmetric drift. Recovering the circular velocity requires a model of that random motion. Unfortunately, the correction matters most in the outer galaxies where stars become sparse,

and that's the most important part because you have most of the enclosed mass within you the farther out you go. And there is where the disputed decline becomes interesting. In this analysis, the inferred speed would fall by about 30. 30 kilometers per second, between 19.5 to 26 and a half kiloparsecs from the center. The fitted outer slope is negative 0.47 plus or minus 0.15. Even though it sounds close to negative 0.5, which would be 1 over square root of radius, a declining outer curve looks increasingly plausible. A precisely capillarian decline is more debatable. Converting it into an extraordinarily

low galactic mass is more model-dependent even still. If the circular velocity really fell as one over the square of radius, then the velocity squared falls as one over radius. Now, if you insert that into the circular velocity equation and the enclosed spherical equivalent mass becomes approximately constant. You move outward, but infer surprisingly little additional gravitating mass, which is awkward for a large extended halo whose enclosed mass should keep growing, and that's a dominant paradigm for the dark matter picture where galaxies are formed and held together and a rotation is driven by the enclosed mass within their visible light radius. But notice the phrase I just used, spherical equivalent.

The Milky Way contains a disk, gas, a bulge, a warp, and a three-dimensional halo. Turning one curve into a mass really requires a lot of geometrical insight. So, where do we go next? The dramatic analysis produces an average total mass estimate of about 2.6 times 10 to the 11 solar masses. That's a lot, 260 billion equivalent solar masses. So this isn't actual stars, but it's stars, gas, and dust. That's below many independent estimates, which are closer to a trillion solar masses. The number comes from fitting the measure of rotation curve and extending a mass model well

beyond the region directly constrained by the stars alone. So this value is very interesting, but its precision should not hide the assumptions that produce it, as all good models have to incorporate. The Gaia base rotation curve is constrained over roughly 9 to 27 kiloparsecs. A Milky Way halo though may extend to something like 200 kiparsecs, so in data extending nearly 30 kiparsecs, produce a total With all halo, most of the mass supplied by that fitted model rather than that traced directly by the stars in that curve. Extrapolation is therefore unavoidable.

But observed and extrapolated aren't synonyms. Inside, Gaia constrains the dynamics. Outside, we have to make theoretical choices to do most of the world. Now at this point, when you start to hear that the paradigm of dark matter may have failed to reproduce the dynamics, you might start to celebrate if you're a Mond advocate, like my past guest, Stacey McGa, or the founder of the Mon Paras. Mordecai Milgram himself. Mon proposes that below a characteristic acceleration, the effective dynamics depart from Newtonian relationship. In the Mon region, the acceleration is approximately

the square root of the Newtonian acceleration times the Mon scale, which is known as A-0. For an isolated barionic mass, this changes the expected orbital behavior without surrounding the galaxy with a conventional particle halo. So, Mon has achieved real predictive successes at galactic scales, including the tight relationship between barionic structure and the observed acceleration. So if the dark matter paradigms curve has a problem, does Mon just win? Now, this is where it becomes deliciously inconvenient for both scenarios. How does Mon's predictions relate to what Gaia has observed? So in this low acceleration limit required for structure to ever form and not have too high velocity dispersion, the velocity to the fourth power equals Newton's constant times the barionic

masses times this constant A-0, this baseline acceleration. So what's missing from this equation? Radius. There's no radius in there. And that's why Mond produces an asymptotically flat rotation curve for an isolated galaxy. That was one of the great attractions, no pun intended, that Mordecai and others were drawn in by. But now it's part of its vulnerability.

Might be part of its downfall if these data are reproducible. If the Milky Way's outer curve is Keplerian, Mond is also expecting something flatter too. that, Dark Manor and Mond arrive at the flat outer rotation curves through completely different physics. Dark Manor says there's an additional gravitating mass. Mon says the low acceleration dynamics are different themselves. A robust Keplerian decline would challenge the simplest extended halo expectation and a deep, Mond, asymptotic behavior. The question becomes not which of these two camps won, but why we're both expecting the wrong curve. So bad news for everybody

is often excellent news for science. I usually say that flaws lead to new laws. That's what I teach by students. When you find a crack, when you find something unexpected, as Einstein did with Newton's gravity, for example, and as Mon may have done with the Dark Matter paradigm, and as inflation did with the Big Bang paradigm, these are exciting times for scientists. A Keplerian decline would not instantly falsify every version of Mon. Mond is nonlinear, so an external gravitational field can influence a galaxy's internal dynamics and modify the Milky Way's outer behavior. The external field effect can generate a decline. So the defensible conclusion is not that Gaia killed Mond, a robust

capillarian curve would instead create tension with the isolated prediction and require that the external gravitational field or another refinement do substantial quantitative work. The scientific test is whether the theory fits the measured curve with independent, justified parameters, not whether or not we can tell a cool story after seeing it. Now here's where I have to insert a warning. This is where experimentalists like me get interested, excited, but also a little bit nervous. Distance errors will alter both the stars in furred position and its tangential velocity.

Any asymmetric drift corrections depend on the tracer density, the gravitation field, and the velocity dispersion, how much these stars are moving independently of the gravitational force, of the dark matter or month. Selection effects can change which stars enter the sample. The warp violates simple disk geometry. Sagittarius and the large Magellanic Cloud also drive non-circular motion.

They're like outer gravitating masses. These tracers become sparse at great distances, and you have to question whether or not the stars are an actual equilibrium. Now, in the Gaia analyses, neglected dynamical terms, and the systematic error budget grow towards the outermost radii. They increase, it gets harder and harder to do, and you get more and more contamination from external gravitating masses like the LNC. None of this proves the decline is false, by the way. It's a brilliant result. It means that the blue curve that we showed earlier may conceal a messy galaxy. Maybe that teenager's to blame.

The more revolutionary the inference, the more carefully we have to distinguish between what Guy measured from what we or our proponents of Mond or Dark Matter would like to interpret. Now, before you declare a winner, Mond has one more move. It isn't a linear theory, which means a galaxy sitting inside someone else's gravitational field doesn't behave like one sitting by itself. And the Milky Way sure ain't lonely. Now, as I said, the Milky Way is not some isolated, perfect galaxy that's relaxed in a laboratory just hanging out. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy nearby, but not part of our galaxy, has reportedly crossed and perturbed our Milky Way's disc. The large Magellanic Cloud is massive, it's nearby, and it's dynamical, it's rotating,

it's doing its own thing too. Together with the Milky Way's galactic warp, these interactions can produce ripples, star streams, and north-south asymmetries between the upper and lower halves of the galaxy. These motions are valuable, but they're not necessarily indicative of equilibrium circular motion. So you wouldn't expect Kepler's law to actually hold in that sense. Force a disturbed population into a steady axi-symmetric model, and the reconstructed curve will absorb the disturbance and present it as a modification to gravity. Sometimes the galaxy is telling us about dark matter.

Sometimes it's telling us that it recently had a close encounter of the third kind. So where does it leave us? At this point, there's three possibilities that I would say remain viable. First, the decline is real, but it's moderate. The Milky Way has a lighter or more concentrated halo. than some older model suggested. Dark matter and Monde both can adjust their parameters, tune them, and survive. Second, the decline is real, but it's exaggerated. It's affected by systematics and dis-equilibrium which were implicitly assumed in the

models. It's the least glamorous answer, which is why scientists have to take it seriously. Third, possibility, the outer disk is sufficiently disturbed that the reconstructed curve can never be assumed to be equilibrium and circular and represent the capillarian profile at all. So we have one pattern and three possible physical stories that I explain it. The evidence that we have doesn't uniquely constrain or select between the three of them. So what would actually settle the tie, if you will? But there are different objects we can use. Young stars called sephiates are dynamically colder. Stellar streams can probe objects farther out, and globular cluster satellites can test at larger

radii. That's in fact how we knew the galaxy had a certain size from the beginning with the Shappley debate of the 1920s. Future Gaia releases improve their astrometry, the position and velocity. We'll also get radio astronomical surveys that will supply different tracers, typically of the gas. A better theoretical models can include the warp, the Sagittarius, mini-dwarf galaxy effect, and the LMC's effects as well explicitly. If we combine those methods with different assumptions and different systematics and we recover the same declaring decline, then we'll have to listen. It'll go from three sigma to many, many sigma in that case, potentially. But our galaxy may be asking a nastier question. Not that dark matter,

lose, not did Mond win, but rather, are we expecting the wrong curve? So what do you think is more preferable given the evidence that we've presented today? Mond, Dark Manor, or something else entirely? Leave your comment below, give the video a thumbs up, exercise your thumb, and don't forget to share this like invisible dark matter throughout your own universe. I'm Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California in San Diego, and I'll see you next time on the channel. And I'd like to conclude this video by thanking my good friend and Alessandro Melichiori and his collaborator Ruchiko. They produced the paper that inspired this.

It came out in August. It's still a preprint, but it's called the rotation curve of the Milky Way, state of the art, the Keplerian declined debate, and implications for dark matter. It's a brilliant paper, and anyone can understand it. They summarize the field, the history, and the controversy. So make sure you check that out. I'll leave a link in the description below. Kepler said that the outer star should slow down.

For 50 years, our galaxy said otherwise, and we invented an invisible halo to explain it. Now our galaxy may be taking it back. If that changes how you think about what we actually know, subscribe and tell me which one you prefer. And don't forget to watch my interviews with Stacey McGaugh and with Mortykeye Milgram.