Galactic Rotation Curves in Conformal Scalar-Tensor Gravity.

We show quantitatively that an exact solution of conformal scalar-tensor gravity can explain very well the galactic rotation curves for a sample of 104 galaxies without the need for dark matter or other exotic modification of gravity. The metric is an overall rescaling of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter space-time as required by Weyl conformal invariance, which has to be spontaneously broken, and the velocity of the stars depends only on two fixed universal parameters. Using the Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) method, we make a fit of the observational rotation curves in order to get the mass-to-light ratio for each galaxy. Finally, we analytically compare our model with the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) and the metric skew tensor gravity (MSTG) showing that the three theories have a very different behavior at very large distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]