📄 Showing the "Simple" version — "Advanced" is not ready yet. Add it to favorites to help prioritize it. Ask for the full read

In tiny satellite galaxies, stars on the outskirts rotate faster than visible matter allows. It’s as if a pattern appears on the fabric of space for which there aren’t enough threads. The explanation is either to add an invisible framework of dark matter (an idea by Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin), or to accept gravity not as a foundation, but as an emergent property — it’s “embroidered” from how space packages information. This emergent hypothesis was proposed by Erik Verlinde, building on Bekenstein.

A test on 23 galaxies showed: in 21 cases, the information model predicted stellar motion more accurately than modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND).

The statistical significance of 5.2σ equates to a one-in-a-million chance that this is a fluke.

And as if to confirm that the visible world is merely a superficial pattern: inside such a galaxy, the naked eye would spot only a handful of nearby stars, even though there are millions; the rest of the sky is blacker than coal.

Original abstract

as written by the authors arXiv:2601.01715v1

We apply Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and Verlinde's emergent gravity separately to calculate the radial accelerations in 23 dwarf spheroidals. Then, we compare them with the observed radial accelerations. In our earlier work, we determined that, when the data set is considered in its entirety without isolating individual dwarf spheroidal, Verlinde's emergent gravity is in close agreement with the observed values. In the present work, we additionally confirm that, for 21 of the 23 samples examined, Verlinde's emergent gravity follows the trend of the observed values within each dwarf spheroidal more closely than MOND. Combining the statistical significance of all the 23 samples, ranging from $$-0.25\sigma$$ to 3.41$$\sigma$$, we conclude that Verlinde's emergent gravity is favored over MOND at 5.2$$\sigma$$.