MOND holds that for accelerations smaller than an a 0 value of roughly 1.2 × 10 m/s, accelerations increasingly depart from the standard M · G / r Newtonian relationship of mass and distance, wherein gravitational strength is proportional to mass and the inverse square of distance. Specifically, the theory holds that when gravity is well below the a 0 value, its rate of change —including the curvature of spacetime —increases with the square root of mass (rather than linearly as per Newtonian law) and decreases linearly with distance (rather than distance squared).