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The rotation curve of a disc galaxy (also called a velocity curve) is a plot of the measured magnitude of the orbital velocities (i.e., the speeds) of visible stars or gas in that galaxy versus their radial distance from that galaxy's centre and typically rendered graphically as a plot. The measured rotation rates of those stars do not match the calculated rates, which calculation is based on well known laws of physics. A general feature of the galaxy rotation curves is that the orbital speed of stars and gas rises or is almost constant as far from the galactic centre as it can be measured: that is, stars are observed to revolve around the centre of the galaxy at increasing or the same speed over a large range of distances from the centre of the galaxy. Given the observed mass distributions in galaxies, the orbital speed should decline at increasing distances in the same way as do other systems with most of their mass in the centre, such as the Solar System or the moons of Jupiter. The rotation curves of spiral galaxies are also known to be asymmetric. The observational data from each side of a galaxy are generally averaged. Rotation curve asymmetry appears to be normal rather than exceptional. The galaxy rotation problem is the discrepancy between observed galaxy rotation curves and the theoretical prediction, assuming a centrally dominated mass associated with the observed luminous material. When mass profiles of galaxies are calculated from the distribution of stars in spirals and mass-to-light ratios in the stellar disks, they do not match with the masses derived from the observed rotation curves and the law of gravity. A solution to this conundrum is to hypothesize the existence of dark matter and to assume its distribution from the galaxy's center out to its halo. Though dark matter is by far the most accepted explanation of the rotation problem, other proposals have been offered with varying degrees of success. Of the possible alternatives, the most notable is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which involves modifying the laws of gravity.〔For an extensive discussion of the data and its fit to MOND see .〕 ==History and description of the galaxy rotation problem== In 1932, Jan Hendrik Oort became the first to report that measurements of the stars in the Solar neighborhood moved faster than expected when a mass distribution based upon visible matter was assumed, but this measurement was later determined to be essentially erroneous.〔Kuijken K., Gilmore G., 1989a, MNRAS, 239, 651.〕 In 1939, Horace Babcock reported in his PhD thesis measurements of the rotation curve for Andromeda which suggested that the mass-to-luminosity ratio increases radially.〔Babcock, H, 1939, "(The rotation of the Andromeda Nebula )", Lick Observatory bulletin; no. 498〕 He attributed that to either the absorption of light within the galaxy or to modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to any form of missing matter. In 1959, Louise Volders demonstrated that spiral galaxy M33 does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington worked with a new sensitive spectrograph that could measure the velocity curve of edge-on spiral galaxies to a greater degree of accuracy than had ever before been achieved. Together with fellow staff-member Kent Ford, Rubin announced at a 1975 meeting of the American Astronomical Society the discovery that most stars in spiral galaxies orbit at roughly the same speed,〔Rubin, V. C., Thonnard, N., and Ford, W. K., Jr., 1978, ApJ 225 L107-L111, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978ApJ...225L.107R〕 and that this implied that galaxy masses grow approximately linearly with radius well beyond the location of most of the stars (the galactic bulge). Rubin presented her results in an influential paper in 1980. These were the first robust results to suggest that either Newtonian gravity does not apply universally or that, conservatively, upwards of 50% of the mass of galaxies was contained in the relatively dark galactic halo. Although initially met with skepticism, Rubin's results have been confirmed over the subsequent decades. If Newtonian mechanics is assumed to be correct, it would follow that most of the mass of the galaxy had to be in the galactic bulge near the center and that the stars and gas in the disk portion should orbit the center at decreasing velocities with radial distance from the galactic center (the dashed line in Fig. 1). Observations of the rotation curve of spirals, however, do not bear this out. Rather, the curves do not decrease in the expected inverse square root relationship but are "flat", i.e. outside of the central bulge the speed is nearly a constant (the solid line in Fig. 1). It is also observed that galaxies with a uniform distribution of luminous matter have a rotation curve that rises from the center to the edge, and most low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSB galaxies) have the same anomalous rotation curve. The rotation curves might be explained by hypothesizing the existence of a substantial amount of matter permeating the galaxy that is not emitting light in the mass-to-light ratio of the central bulge. The material responsible for the extra mass was dubbed, "dark matter", the existence of which was first posited in the 1930s by Jan Oort in his measurements of the Oort constants and Fritz Zwicky in his studies of the masses of galaxy clusters. The existence of non-baryonic cold dark matter (CDM) is today a major feature of the Lambda-CDM model that describes the cosmology of the universe. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Galaxy rotation curve」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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