Thermodynamic Origin of the Tully-Fisher Relation in Dark Matter Dominated Galaxies: A Theoretical-Empirical Derivation

V. K. Oikonomou

doi:10.1016/j.dark.2026.102346

paper

Thermodynamic Origin of the Tully-Fisher Relation in Dark Matter Dominated Galaxies: A Theoretical-Empirical Derivation

arXiv:2511.13929 · doi:10.1016/j.dark.2026.102346

Abstract

In this work we introduce the concept of self-interacting dark matter with scale-dependent equation of state, in the context of which dark matter is collisional and its equation of state is radius-dependent and has the form $P (r) = K (r) (\frac{ρ ( r )}{ρ _{⋆}})^{γ (r)}$ . We confronted the effectively 2-parameter model with 174 galaxies from the SPARC data, and we found that the rotation curves of 100 galaxies can be perfectly fitted by the model. These galaxies are dark matter dominated, mostly dwarfs, low-luminosity and low-surface-brightness spiral galaxies. We demonstrate that scale-dependent self-interacting dark matter solves the cusp-core issue for dark matter dominated galaxies. More importantly, the structure of the scale-dependent SIDM model produces in a semi-theoretically and semi-empirically way the canonical Tully-Fisher and the baryonic Tully-Fisher relations when these 100 viable dwarfs, low-surface-brightness and low-luminosity galaxies are taken into account. The behavior of the entropy function $K (r)$ is assumed to be $K (r) = K_{0} \times (1 + \frac{r}{r _{c}})^{- p}$ . The perfect fits of the rotation curves come for a nearly isothermal and virialized dark matter halo, which naturally predicts the correlation $K_{0} \sim V_{max}^{2}$ . This correlation holds true empirically as confirmed by the data and we also find empirically $L \sim K_{0}^{2}$ from the data, thus the canonical Tully-Fisher relation is reproduced semi-theoretically and semi-empirically. We perform the same task and we find theoretically, for dark matter dominated galaxies, that $K_{0} \sim V_{flat}^{2}$ which is also confirmed empirically from the data, along with the correlation $K_{0} \sim M_{b}^{0.5}$ , hence the baryonic Tully-Fisher law naturally emerges in a semi-theoretical and semi-empirical manner.

arXiv commentWorking paper. The arXiv entry contains an extended appendix with all the SPARC galaxies. The journal version will not include the appendix, only some characteristic galaxies will be presented

Thermodynamic Origin of the Tully-Fisher Relation in Dark Matter Dominated Galaxies: A Theoretical-Empirical Derivation

Abstract

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