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arXiv · 2610.06841

Testing Refracted Gravity with the kinematics of stacked galaxy clusters

Dario Primignani·Lorenzo Pizzuti·Antonaldo Diaferio·Valeria Broccolato
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Abstract

We test Refracted Gravity (RG), a phenomenological modified gravity model that modifies the Poisson equation by introducing an effective gravitational permittivity $ε(ρ_{\rm bar})$ which depends on the baryonic matter density $ρ_{\rm bar}$ and mimics the behaviour of dark matter in cosmic structures. We perform a kinematical analysis of member galaxies for a sample of 74 galaxy clusters, compiled from the Cluster Infall Regions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (CIRS). We stack the clusters in three bins of increasing velocity dispersion to mitigate the effects of systematic errors induced by deviations from dynamical equilibrium and from the assumption of spherical symmetry. By means of the \texttt{MG-MAMPOSSt} code, we reconstruct the gravitational potential in RG and infer the model parameters jointly with the gas and stellar mass-profile parameters, adopting broad, physically informed priors on the baryonic components. The estimates of the main parameter in Refracted Gravity, the vacuum permittivity $ε_0$, range from $0.04$ to $0.37$, across the three main stacks, depending on the model adopted for the hot gas component. The constraints are mutually compatible within the quoted uncertainties and overlap with previous cluster-scale estimates. The agreement becomes less sensitive to gas parametrisation when selecting the less-disturbed clusters for building the stacks. These results characterize the sensitivity of cluster-scale RG constraints to baryonic modelling and sample selection

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Dario Primignani, Lorenzo Pizzuti, Antonaldo Diaferio, Valeria Broccolato. 2026-10-05. Testing Refracted Gravity with the kinematics of stacked galaxy clusters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06841

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