1. Introduction
The general theory of relativity (GR) [
1] is considered as one of the most successful and beautiful physical theories. It is worth mentioning the following main predictions and successful confirmations: deflection of light near the Sun, black holes, gravitational light redshift, lensing, and gravitational waves, see e.g. [
2].
In the Standard Model of Cosmology (SMC) [
3], also known as
CDM model, GR is adopted as theory of gravitation at all space-time scales, from the solar system to the galactic and cosmic ones. To describe galactic rotational curves and accelerated expansion of the universe by GR, it was supposed existence of dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE), respectively. According to the current SMC, the universe matter/energy budget consists approximately of 68 % of dark energy, 27 % of dark matter and only 5 % of standard visible matter. However, despite many experimental and theoretical investigations (as a review, see e.g. [
4]), the existence of DM and DE has not been proven, thus they are still hypothetical constituents of the dark side of the universe.
It should be also mentioned that GR suffers from the singularities – the black hole and Big Bang singularity [
5]. As we know, if theory contains a singularity it means its inapplicability when approaching to singularity and that a more general appropriate theory should be invented. Also, it should be mentioning that GR can not be consistently quantized [
6]. As we know, other physical theories have their own domain of validity, usually limited by the space-time scale and some parameters, or by complexity of the system. In this sense, GR should not be an exception and serve as a theory of gravity from the Planck scale to the universe as a whole [
7].
Based on all the aforementioned shortcomings, it can be concluded that general relativity is not a final theory of gravitation and that there is a sense to look for a more general theory than GR [
8]. In principle, there is a huge number of possibilities to extend the Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action and for now there is no rule on how to choose the right path [
9,
10]. Hence, in practice there are many phenomenological approaches and the most elaborated is
theory [
11], where in the EH action the scalar curvature
R is replaced by some function
. Among other interesting approaches is the nonlocal one [
13,
39]. In the nonlocal gravity models, besides
R in the EH action there is a nonlocal term with some invariants usually composed of
R and □, where □ is the d’Alembert-Beltrami operator.
Depending on how the □ is built into the nonlocal term, there are mainly two typical examples of nonlocal gravity models: (i) non-polynomial analytic expansion of □, see e.g. [
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20], i.e.
(see various examples [
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26]), and (ii) a polynomial of
, see e.g. [
27,
28,
29,
30,
39]. The motivation for using a local operator of the form (i) is found in string theory – ordinary and
p-adic one [
31]. It is obvious that in the case (i) dynamics depends not only on the first and second space-time derivatives but also on the all higher ones. Nonlocal operator
in (ii) has its origin in (one-loop) quantum corrections to some classical field Lagrangians and is used in investigation of the late time cosmic acceleration without dark energy [
39].
In several papers, see [
19,
30] and references therein, we investigated the following nonlocal de Sitter gravity model (
gravity):
where
is the cosmological constant and nonlocal operator
has the following general form:
This nonlocal model is unique compared to other non-local models and its properties will be described in the next section.
It is worth mentioning that (
1) applied to the homogeneous and isotropic universe gives several exact cosmological solutions [
19,
30]. One of them is
, which mimics an interplay of dark matter (
) and dark energy (
) in very good agreement with the standard model of cosmology. There are also nonsingular bounce solutions in the flat, closed and open universe as well as singular and cyclic solutions.
The fact that the model works well on a cosmological scale was motivation to test it on galactic and planetary systems. To this end, it is necessary to get the corresponding Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric. In the paper [
32] we presented an initial research with an approximate solution. In this paper, we provide a much wider and more detailed investigation with some new solutions. It also contains preliminary test in our galaxy Milky Way and the spiral galaxy M33 with very satisfactory agreement of obtained theoretical results and observational measurements.
This paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, nonlocal de Sitter gravity
is introduced and the equations of motion for the gravitational field are derived. Various aspects of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric are presented in
Section 3, which in particular contains the solutions and their comparison with observations of the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. Some discussion and presentation of the main results is contained in the last section.
2. Nonlocal Gravity
Our nonlocal gravity model is given by its action (
1). It can be rewritten in the compact form
where
is
with the general form of the d’Alembert-Beltrami operator
If
, i.e.
, then (
3) becomes local de Sitter gravity with action
Note that action (
3) can be easily obtained from (
6) by embedding operator (
4) inside the product
It should be noted that the degree of
remains unchanged when we go from local (
6) to non-local action (
3), as well as that
operator is dimensionless. It is also worth noting that above local and nonlocal action has the same discrete symmetry, i.e. remains unchanged under transformation
In this paper, we will not consider the extension of action (
1) with the matter sector, since we are looking for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric outside the spherically symmetric massive body.
2.1. Equations of Motion
To obtain equations of motion for
gravity given by action (
1), it is useful to start from more general nonlocal de Sitter model
where
and
are some differentiable functions of the Ricci scalar
Variation of (
7) with respect to
yields the corresponding equations of motion (EoM) derived in [
33], see also [
30].
According to [
33], the EoM for nonlocal de Sitter gravity model (
7) are as follows:
where
is the Einstein tensor,
is the Ricci tensor and
where
and
denote the derivative of
and
with respect to
R.
Comparing the above equations of motion with respect to their local Einstein counterpart they look very complex and finding some exact solutions may be a hard problem.
Since we are interested in the EoM of
, we have to take
. To this end, let us first consider the case
. Consequently, equations (
8)–(
11) reduce to
According to our experience, the above equations of motion (12)–(14) can be significantly simplified and easily solved if there exists a metric tensor
such that for the corresponding d’Alembert-Beltrami operator □ the following equations (eigenvalue problem) is satisfied:
where
q is a parameter of the same dimensionality as □. Applying (
15) to equations (12)–(14), we have
Now, let us take
. Then
and
Finally, EoM (18) become
If the nonlocal operator satisfies
then equations of motion (
19) are also satisfied.
According to the above consideration, the main problem is to solve equation for an appropriate metric tensor . This my be a hard problem, and it is the case with the corresponding Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric in the nonlocal gravity. In the sequel, we will investigate the corresponding Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric around static spherically symmetric massive body.
4. Discussion and Concluding Remarks
This paper presents the results of our research regarding the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric of the nonlocal
gravity model (
1). We found the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric in the form of
(
53), what corresponds to the weak gravity approximation and the linearization of nonlinear differential equation (40). The obtained results were tested on the rotation curves of the Milky Way and the spiral galaxy M33. The calculated and measured values of circular velocities are in good agreement.
Some additional explanations should be given to some parts of these investigations. First, we need to clarify why the weak gravitational field approximation works well here. On the one hand, we derived the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric away from the massive spherically symmetric body. And on the other hand, we applied the obtained formula for the circular motion of the test body to the circular velocities in spiral galaxies far from their centers where the black hole is located. Recall that the rotation curves were observed in the domain: 9.5 –26.5 kpc for the Milky Way galaxy [
40] and 0.5 –23.5 kpc for the M33 galaxy [
41]. In the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, it is assumed that dark matter plays an important role in the mentioned domains. However, there is no dark matter in our nonlocal model. The good agreement between observational measurements and theoretical predictions tells us that the role of dark matter can be played by the nonlocality in the presence of the cosmological constant
in the
gravity model.
Regarding the applicability of the obtained formula for the circular velocity (
56) at smaller distances, such as the solar system, the following should be noted. The circular velocity
depends on three terms: (i)
, (ii)
and (iii)
. The third term depends linearly on
and with a fixed
its value can be controlled by choosing the appropriate value of
. One can always take a small enough value of
, e.g.
, so that the first term has a dominant role, since the second term has an important meaning only at distances of the size of the visible universe. Therefore, the velocity formula (
56) is also valid for the solar system.
The main new results presented in this article can be summarized as follows.
In the approximation of the weak gravitational field, a fourth-order linear differential equation for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric was obtained (
47).
A general solution (
48) of equation (
47) was found.
A particular solution of
was found (
49) such that it satisfies the necessary condition that it tends to zero when the nonlocality vanishes.
The obtained theoretical formula for circular velocity (
56) was tested on the rotation curves of two spiral galaxies: the Milky Way and M33. The agreement between the calculated and measured circular velocities is good, especially for the Milky Way, see
Figure 2 and
Figure 3 and the corresponding tables. To our knowledge, this is the first good description of “the Keplerian decline in the Milky Way rotation curve” by some modified gravity model.
In summary, it can be said that the presented results in this paper are encouraging and deserve further research, especially taking into account the mass distribution in spiral galaxies using [
42]. Bearing in mind also previously obtained results on the evolution of the universe [
19,
30], where the effects that are usually attributed to dark energy and dark matter can be described by the nonlocality of the gravity model
, we will continue with the further study of this model of nonlocal de Sitter gravity.