[dogma1138]

It's seems that the authors of the paper all come from the LCDM/Dark Matter observational testing community, this isn't a paper by MOND theorists. They were quite likely looking for evidence of dark matter with the ESO survey and found something else.

Right or wrong, this is the definition of good science.

[cbkeller]

Vera Rubin would approve. Despite making a lot of the critical rotation rate measurements on spiral galaxies [1,2,3], it seems as though she was never particularly happy with the interpretation of this result as dark matter:

> "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances. That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle." [4]

[1] http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1970ApJ...159..379R/...

[2] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1980ApJ...238..471R7

[3] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.astro....

[4] https://scientificwomen.net/women/rubin-vera-86

[ChrisSD]

The OP was about how pop-sci reports the paper, not the science itself.

[ineptech]

TFA ends with, "It’s an intriguing result, and it may lend some weight to the MOND hypothesis for further study. But it’s important to keep in mind that so far the bulk of the evidence still points towards dark matter, and it’ll take much more work to topple that hypothesis entirely."