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Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
Flat rotation curves took on the air of a de facto natural law and precipitated the modern dark matter paradigm. The red line shows the expected rotation curve for the detected normal matter, which includes both the stars (yellow, from 2MASS) and atomic gas (blue, from THINGS). I’ll forgo a detailed discussion of this for now (see Mistele et al. if you’re eager), but the bottom line is that it would require some unnatural fine-tuning for the 1+2 halo terms to add up to such flat rotation curves.
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