On the Missing Area of the Bullet Cluster

The Bullet Cluster is widely regarded as direct empirical evidence for non baryonic dark matter. We test the Mezzi framework, which poses the "missing mass"problem as a "missing area": a distant observer measures the local baryonic density and surface brightness correctly, but integrates them over compressed coordinates, underestimating the true mass. We correct the apparent compression via a nonlinear Area Jacobian, built from direct ray tracing of the vacuum flow along the light's trajectory and governed by the vacuum compliance constant, C ≈ 377 calibrated on the 175 SPARC rotation curves and held fixed in the present analysis. The resulting True Frame convergence map reproduces the observed strong lensing regions (κ ≥ 1) centered on the collisionless galaxies, with an overall mass correction of η ≈ 4.5, without dark matter or modified gravity. The code is available at https://github.com/Brahim-Benaissa/Mezzi_Bullet_Cluster