I hate this title, even though it's a good article. It's nothing to do with gravity "breaking down"; maybe oul the current THEORY of gravity breaking down. So annoying that titles need to be sensationalized.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Well, it is a direct quote from the study, so maybe not the journalist's fault this time:
"direct evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity at weak acceleration” and reveal “an immovable anomaly of gravity in favor of MOND-based modified gravity"
So it would be a breakdown of standard gravity, not of gravity full stop. Sensationalized headline.
Yeah, a better title would have been "new observations show gravity anomaly indicating that current dark matter theories are incomplete", but you get fewer clicks with something like that, right?
Huh, this is interesting. I found a slightly more in depth article on this: https://www.universetoday.com/162749/evidence-for-modified-gravity-found-in-the-motions-of-binary-stars/
It'd be amazing if this actually led to something MoNDish being the prevalent theory of gravity. Wouldn't that essentially explain dark matter?
It could explain the observations of the orbits of stars around galactic centers that currently can't be explained (stars move faster than current models predict), yes. It would be an alternate explanation for this anomaly than dark matter, which is the other proposed "if this exists, it would explain what we see" hypothesis.
I found an article that's more skeptical https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/binary-stars-prove-modified-gravity/. I'm no expert but it does make a good case for why this result might be suspect