The External Field Effect (EFE)
In MOND it turns out that if a weakly gravitationally bound system s, whose inner accelerations are expected to be of the order of 10−10 m s−2 from a Newtonian calculation, is embedded in an external gravitational field generated by a larger array of masses S, then, even if is uniform throughout the spatial extension of s, the internal dynamics of the latter is influenced by in such a way that the total acceleration within s is, actually, larger than 10−10 m s−2. In other words, the Strong Equivalence Principle is violated. Milgrom originally introduced such a concept to explain the fact that the expected phenomenology of dark matter—-to be explained in terms of MOND—-was absent just in some systems (open clusters) in which it should have, instead, been present. It was shown later by R. Scarpa and collaborators that also a number of globular clusters in the neighborhood of the Milky Way behave in the same way, that is MOND effects are seen even though the total (internal+external) field is above MOND acceleration limit.
Read more about this topic: Modified Newtonian Dynamics
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