I'm not a physicist but 1/r^2 strikes me as conceptually very important, because it's the relative contribution of any fixed area of spherical surface to the total area of that surface. So the total strength of gravitational field emanating from a particular object, at a given distance from that object, is a constant.
It's somewhat weird to think of the total gravitational "force field" _increasing_ in magnitude with distance. Decreasing, sure. Increasing? That makes no sense. Certainly not at a large enough function of distance for the rotational curve to be _flat_. That's got to be some kind of wonky power term over distance which implies potential energy from the field goes up with distance as well.
As above, I'm not a physicist, but a linear rotational curve breaks every intuition I've ever gleaned from physics about the nature of what's really going on with relativity, particle mediation of forces, or even the concept of a field.
Maybe it means spacetime curvature is way higher than we think.
It's somewhat weird to think of the total gravitational "force field" _increasing_ in magnitude with distance. Decreasing, sure. Increasing? That makes no sense. Certainly not at a large enough function of distance for the rotational curve to be _flat_. That's got to be some kind of wonky power term over distance which implies potential energy from the field goes up with distance as well.
As above, I'm not a physicist, but a linear rotational curve breaks every intuition I've ever gleaned from physics about the nature of what's really going on with relativity, particle mediation of forces, or even the concept of a field.
Maybe it means spacetime curvature is way higher than we think.