Galaxy Rotation, No Dark Matter:
How Bandwidth Limits May Rewrite Gravity

The Information Weight Formula

A Galaxy That Shouldn't Spin This Fast

In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin peered through her spectrograph at the Andromeda galaxy and saw something that shouldn't exist. Stars at the galaxy's edge were whipping around at nearly the same speed as those near the center—defying Newton's laws. It was like discovering that Pluto orbits the Sun as fast as Mercury.

For five decades, physicists have explained this cosmic speed limit violation by adding invisible "dark matter" to their equations. But what if the problem isn't missing matter? What if gravity itself works differently when stretched across cosmic scales?

A Century of the Missing Mass

A Different Answer: Information-Limited Gravity

Imagine reality as a vast cosmic spreadsheet that must keep all its cells—every particle, every field—perfectly synchronized. This universal ledger has finite processing power. Like a video streaming service during peak hours, it must prioritize where to allocate its bandwidth.

Show Me the Evidence

The researchers tested their model on the SPARC dataset—high-quality rotation curves for 126 galaxies spanning five orders of magnitude in mass. Unlike typical analyses that adjust parameters for each galaxy, this study used globally fixed values derived from theoretical principles.

How It Works

The information-limited gravity model introduces a "weight function" that modifies gravitational acceleration based on how efficiently the cosmic ledger can update different regions of space. Think of it as a cosmic triage system—some areas get priority updates while others experience lag.

The key insight is that systems with different timescales receive different levels of attention from the universe's information-processing infrastructure. A planet orbiting the Sun completes its circuit in months or years—fast enough that the cosmic ledger can keep up with near-perfect accuracy. Newton's laws work beautifully.

But a star orbiting the center of a galaxy? That takes 200 million years to complete one loop. From the ledger's perspective, this is glacially slow, low-priority traffic. The system can afford to batch updates, leading to accumulated lag that manifests as apparently stronger gravity.

Falsifiability First: The Tests That Could Break It

If It's Right: The Big Picture

If information-limited gravity proves correct, it would represent one of the most profound shifts in physics since Einstein's relativity. Instead of a universe mysteriously dominated by invisible matter and dark energy, we'd have a cosmos governed by information-processing constraints—a computational universe with finite bandwidth.

The implications cascade across multiple scales. Galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing anomalies, and possibly even cosmic acceleration could all emerge from the same fundamental limitation: the universe's finite capacity to update gravitational fields everywhere simultaneously.

Perhaps most remarkably, this framework suggests that consciousness and physics share a common foundation. Both emerge from information processing under bandwidth constraints. The same ledger that governs particle interactions might underlie awareness itself—reality recognizing itself through finite computational resources.

It would mean the universe isn't missing 95% of its matter. We've simply been using equations that assume infinite computational resources—a luxury the cosmos apparently doesn't have.

Skeptics' Corner

Information-limited gravity faces formidable challenges that any honest assessment must acknowledge. The model's relativistic extension predicts specific lensing enhancements in galaxy clusters that haven't been observed—a potential smoking gun that could falsify the entire framework within the next few years.

The cosmological implications remain largely unexplored. While the model handles galaxy-scale dynamics well, it's unclear how it would affect cosmic microwave background patterns, large-scale structure formation, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Dark matter, for all its elusiveness, successfully explains these phenomena.

Perhaps most critically, the rotation curve fits—while impressive—rely on systematic uncertainties in distance measurements, inclination angles, and stellar mass-to-light ratios that could shift the results. A small error in any of these could dramatically change the conclusions.

The scientific community has invested decades in dark matter searches precisely because the evidence seemed overwhelming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a model that discards 85% of the universe's matter needs to clear an extraordinarily high bar. The next few years of observations will be crucial.

What's Next

The beauty of information-limited gravity lies in its falsifiability. Unlike dark matter—which has evaded detection for decades—this model makes specific, testable predictions that will be confirmed or refuted within the next few years.

The timeline is remarkably compressed compared to typical physics breakthroughs. Most of these tests use existing or soon-to-be-deployed instruments. The model will either survive this gauntlet and revolutionize our understanding of gravity, or it will join the graveyard of beautiful theories killed by ugly facts.

For the scientific community, this represents an opportunity to engage with a genuinely falsifiable alternative to dark matter. The authors have provided complete code, data, and reproducible pipelines. Independent groups can—and should—attempt to replicate, extend, or refute these results.