English

Testing gravity with the Milky Way: Yukawa potential

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2021-08-18 v2

Abstract

We test a Yukawa correction to the Newtonian potential, making use of our own Galaxy - the Milky Way - as a testbed. We include as free parameter the Yukawa strength and range and the dark matter profile parameters, and compare several morphologies for the bulge, gas, and disk components, also using Bayesian model selection criteria. We employ up-to-date datasets for both the visible (baryonic) component of the Milky Way, and for the tracers of the gravitational potential (the Rotation Curve). We find that the data are consistent with the Newtonian potential, and constrain the Yukawa coupling β\beta to be negative and λ\lambda to range along the curve λ=aβc\lambda = a|\beta|^{c} with a=(0.77±0.06)a = (0.77 \pm 0.06) kpc and c=0.503+0.0160.019c = -0.503\substack{+0.016 \\ -0.019}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.15190,
  title  = {Testing gravity with the Milky Way: Yukawa potential},
  author = {Jakob Henrichs and Margherita Lembo and Fabio Iocco and Luca Amendola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.15190},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

27 pages, 16 figures, minor changes to reflect the accepted version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:43:36.028Z