2009/02/17 by Claudio Llinares, HongSheng Zhao, Alexander Knebe
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/695/2/l145
4 pages. 2 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJL
arxiv created 2009/02/17 · openalex publication_date 2009/03/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The statistics of high-speed satellite galaxies, as reported in the recent literature, can be a powerful diagnosis of the depth of the potential well of the host halo, and hence discriminate between competing gravitational theories. Naively one expects that high-speed satellites are more common in modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) than in cold dark matter (CDM) since an isolated MONDian system has an infinite potential well, while CDM halos have finite potential wells. In this Letter, we report on an initial test of this hypothesis in the context of the first generation of cosmological simulations utilizing a rigorous MONDian Poisson solver. We find that such high-speed encounters are approximately a factor of 4 more common in MOND than in the concordance ΛCDM model of cosmic structure formation.