Effective fluid description of the dark universe

Abstract

We propose an effective anisotropic fluid description for a generic infrared-modified theory of gravity. In our framework, the additional component of the acceleration, commonly attributed to dark matter, is explained as a radial pressure generated by the reaction of the dark energy fluid to the presence of baryonic matter. Using quite general assumptions, and a microscopic description of the fluid in terms of a Bose–Einstein condensate of gravitons, we find the static, spherically symmetric solution for the metric in terms of the Misner–Sharp mass function and the fluid pressure. At galactic scales, we correctly reproduce the leading MOND-like log⁡(r) and subleading (1/r)log⁡(r) terms in the weak-field expansion of the potential. Our description also predicts a tiny (of order 10−6 for a typical spiral galaxy) Machian modification of the Newtonian potential at galactic scales, which is controlled by the cosmological acceleration.