Verlinde's emergent gravity versus MOND and the case of dwarf spheroidals

Understand

In a recent paper, Erik Verlinde has developed the interesting possibility that spacetime and gravity may emerge from the entangled structure of an underlying microscopic theory.

• In this picture, dark matter arises as a response to the standard model of particle physics from the delocalized degrees of freedom that build up the dark energy component of the Universe.
• Dark matter physics is then regulated by a characteristic acceleration scale $a_0$, identified with the radius of the (quasi)-de Sitter universe we inhabit.
• For a point particle matter source, or outside an extended spherically symmetric object, MOND's empirical fitting formula is recovered.