Clusters of Galaxies in a Weyl Geometric Approach to Gravity

A model for the dark halos of galaxy clusters, based on the Weyl geometric scalar tensor theory of gravity (WST) with a MOND-like approximation, is proposed. It is uniquely determined by the baryonic mass distribution of hot gas and stars. A first heuristic check against empirical data for 19 clusters (2 of which are outliers), taken from the literature, shows encouraging results. Modulo a caveat resulting from different background theories (Einstein gravity plus ΛCDM versus WST), the total mass for 15 of the outlier reduced ensemble of 17 clusters seems to be predicted correctly (in the sense of overlapping 1σ error intervals).