Origin of the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies in the Coma cluster without fine-tuning

Thirty years after the discovery of the fundamental plane, explanations of the tilt of the fundamental plane with respect to the virial plane are still in need of fine-tuning. In this paper, we try to explore the origin of this tilt from the perspective of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) by applying the 16 Coma galaxies available in J. Thomas et al. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 415, 545 (2011). Based on the mass models that can reproduce de Vaucouleurs' law closely, we find that the tilt of the traditional fundamental plane is naturally explained by the simple form of the MONDian interpolating function, if we assume a well motivated choice of anisotropic velocity distribution, and adopt the Kroupa or Salpeter stellar mass-to-light ratio. Our analysis does not necessarily rule out a varying stellar mass-to-light ratio.