ARE GALACTIC ROTATION CURVES REALLY FLAT

In this paper we identify an apparently previously unappreciated regul arity in the systematics of galactic rotation curves; namely, we find that at the last detected points in galaxies of widely varying luminos ity, the centripetal acceleration is found to have the completely univ ersal form (upsilon(2)/c(2)R)(last) = gamma(0)/2 + gammaN*/2 + beta*N /R-2, where gamma(0) and gamma* are new universal constants, beta* is the Schwarzschild radius of the Sun, and N is the total amount of vi sible matter in each galaxy. This regularity points to a possible role for the linear potentials associated with conformal gravity, with the galaxy-independent gamma(0) term being found not to be generated from within individual galaxies at all but rather to be of cosmological or igin, being due to the global Hubble flow of a necessarily spatially o pen universe of 3-space scalar curvature k = -(gamma(0)/2)(2) = -2.3 x 10(-60) cm(-2).