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Zwicky's Coma-Observation and MOND

Paul R. Gerber

Fritz Zwicky observed that the velocity dispersion of galaxies in the Coma galaxy-cluster appeared to be much too high to keep the galaxies together in a cluster. This conclusion was derived from the virial theorem by assuming that the interstellar gravitational force can be derived from a potential. At the time it was not recognized that this is an unjustified assumption, a fact that is still not properly appreciated nowadays. In this note we show that the Coma cluster actually stays together because pairs of stars in an inter-galactic arrangement attract each other essentially by a force decaying according to a 1/r law, where r is the distance of the pair. This type of behaviour has originally been proposed by Milgrom to account for galaxy rotation curves. For such a law there are no free bodies at all ! Actually, there is already a crossover to this law within a single galaxy. Here, we show that a mechanism of counter-flowing massless gravitons and anti-gravitons leads to such a behaviour, namely when this interstellar mechanism starts to obtain competition from the acceleration processes provided by the direction-unspecific cosmic gravitational background radiation.