📄 The Intrinsic Scatter of the Radial Acceleration Relation

Authors: Connor Stone, Stephane Courteau

arXiv: 1908.06105
Journal: The Astrophysical Journal
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab3126

The Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR) describes a tight correlation between the centripetal acceleration inferred from rotation curves and the gravitational acceleration predicted from baryons alone. We measure the intrinsic scatter of this relation using a hierarchical Bayesian model that accounts for observational errors in both axes, finding that the intrinsic scatter is extremely small and consistent with zero for high-quality samples — a strong constraint for both dark matter and modified gravity models.