While the nucleon plays an important role in nuclear physics and astrophysics, many aspects of its internal structure and the origin of its mass remain poorly understood. In recent years, significant attention has focused on nucleon matrix elements of the energy–momentum tensor, which define the so-called gravitational form factors encoding properties such as the mass distribution, internal pressure, and shear forces.

In this talk, we analyze the nucleon gravitational form factors under the assumption of light scalar meson dominance and compare our results with lattice QCD simulations. We demonstrate that the D-form factor is closely related to the decomposition of the nucleon mass into two distinct components: the contribution arising from spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and the chiral-invariant contribution. To reproduce the lattice results, we show that a substantial portion of the nucleon mass is chiral invariant. This sizable chiral-invariant mass is also consistent with values inferred from astrophysical studies.