Do Gravitational Fields Have Mass? Or on the Nature of Dark Matter

Abstract

As has been shown before (a brief comment will be given in the text), relativistic mass and relativistic time dilation of moving bodies are equivalent as well as time and mass in the rest frame. This implies that the time dilation due to the gravitational field is combined with inertial and gravitational mass as well and permits the computation of the gravitational action of the vacuum constituting the gravitational field in any distance from the source of the field. Theoretical predictions are compared with experimental results and it is shown that many known astrophysical and gravitational phenomena, especially the so-called dark or missing matter, owe their existence to the gravitational effects of the mass of the field-vacuum.