Exact vacuum solution to conformal Weyl gravity and galactic rotation curves

Abstract

The complete, exact exterior solution for a static, spherically symmetric source in locally conformal invariant Weyl gravity is presented. The solution includes the familiar exterior Schwarzschild solution as a special case and contains an extra gravitational potential term which grows linearly with distance. The obtained solution provides a potential explanation for observed galactic rotation curves without the need for dark matter. The solution also has some interesting implications for cosmology.