Spherically Symmetric Solutions and Dark Matter on the Brane

It has recently been suggested that our universe is a three-brane embedded in a higher dimensional spacetime. In this paper I examine static, spherically symmetric solutions that satisfy the effective Einstein field equations on a brane embedded in a five dimensional spacetime. The field equations involve a term depending on the five dimensional Weyl tensor, so that the solutions will not be Schwarzschild in general. This Weyl term is traceless so that any solution of ⁽⁴⁾ R = 0 is a possible four dimensional spacetime. Different solutions correspond to different five dimensional spacetimes and to different induced energy-momentum tensors on the brane. One interesting possibility is that the Weyl term could be responsible for the observed dark matter in the universe. It is shown that there are solutions of the equation ⁽⁴⁾ R = 0 that can account for the observed rotation curves of spiral galaxies.