The mystery of dark matter—unseen, pervasive, and essential in standard #cosmology—has loomed over #physics for decades.
Rather than postulating new particles, a new study proposes that perhaps #gravity itself behaves differently on the largest scales.
Gravity might evolve when viewed through the lens of #quantum field #theory.
Instead of assuming Newton's gravitational constant is absolutely fixed at #cosmic distances, perhaps it changes with scale.
In quantum field theories, coupling constants typically depend on the energy or length scale—this is the idea of renormalization group running. While this running is well-studied at microscopic scales (high energy), it should be asked whether a similar concept might apply in reverse at immense distances.
Remarkably, such a correction leads to a long-range force, which naturally generates flat rotation curves in #galaxies, the very effect traditionally attributed to dark matter halos.
But this is only one result and many similar corrections have been proposed to explain away the dark matter of galaxies.
The key test of this new theoretical frameworkremains to be done: it must fit everything we know about gravity and predict something new that can be observationally verified.
#astronomy
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-infrared-gravity-field-theoretic-route.html
Paper by Kumar (2025):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026932500766X?via%3Dihub
