Are Galactic Rotation Curves Really Flat?

In this paper we identify a new regularity in the systematics of galacticrotation curves, namely we find that at the last detected points in galaxies ofwidely varying luminosity, the centripetal acceleration is found to have thecompletely universal form $v^2/R=c^2(\gamma_0+\gamma^{*}N^{*})/2$ where$\gamma_0$ and $\gamma^{*}$ are new universal constants and $N^{*}$ is theamount of visible matter in each galaxy. This regularity points to a role forthe linear potentials associated with conformal gravity, with the galaxyindependent $\gamma_0$ term being found to be generated not from withinindividual galaxies at all, but rather to be of cosmological origin being dueto the global Hubble flow of a necessarily spatially open Universe of 3-spacescalar curvature $k=-(\gamma_0/2)^2=-2.3 \times 10^{-60}$cm$^{-2}$.Comment: LaTeX, 12 pages plus 1 postscript figur