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by lisper 2108 days ago
"The most serious problem facing [MOND] is that it cannot completely eliminate the need for dark matter in all astrophysical systems: galaxy clusters show a residual mass discrepancy even when analysed using MOND. The fact that some form of unseen mass must exist in these systems detracts from the elegance of MOND as a solution to the missing mass problem..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

2 comments

MOND brings it down to levels that could potentially be explained with missing baryonic matter and other Dark Matter candidates that fall within the standard model.

There are however other issues with MOND including that gravity is still instantaneous (in most variations) which we know with gravitational waves it isn't, as well as that most of them don't lend to the formation of stars and galaxies. If we take vanilla MOND then the universe as we know it shouldn't have been formed matter wouldn't clump up to form the formations we can see around us and the one we live on.

I don't really have an opinion but in fairness, the article is about a discrepancy between the data and current dark matter models.
Sure. But the question was: why doesn't MOND get more love? And the answer is: because it doesn't actually solve the problem. Nothing solves the problem at the moment. That's what makes this such a juicy mystery.
If we are being completely frank here MOND doesn't gets as much love because it goes against GR, besides the fact that General Relativity is one of the most observationally validated theories we have there is quite a bit of dogma revolving around it as well.

MOND isn't a career ender as much as say cold fusion is, but it's pretty close.

And in all honesty if we look at Modified Gravity theories as a whole they shouldn't be anymore more offensive to one's career than say string theory and despite string theory being essentially a dead end for decades now it doesn't get anywhere near that level of stigma that MOND does and that's more for a cultural / dogmatic reason than purely scientific ones.