Current data on the globular cluster Palomar 14 are not inconsistent with MOND

Understand

Certain types of globular clusters have the very important property that the predictions for their kinematics in the Newtonian and modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) contexts are divergent.

• Here, we caution the recent claim that the stellar kinematics data (using 17 stars) of the globular cluster Palomar 14 are inconsistent with MOND.
• We compare the observations to the theoretical predictions using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, which is appropriate for small samples.
• We find that, with the currently available data, the MOND prediction for the velocity distribution can only be excluded with a very low confidence level, clearly insufficient to claim that MOND is falsified.