CFHTLenS: testing the laws of gravity with tomographic weak lensing and redshift-space distortions

Dark energy may be the first sign of new fundamental physics in the Universe, taking either a physical form or revealing a correction to Einsteinian gravity. Weak gravitational lensing and galaxy peculiar velocities provide complementary probes of general relativity, and in combination allow us to t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2013-03, Vol.429 (3), p.2249-2263
Main Authors: Simpson, Fergus, Heymans, Catherine, Parkinson, David, Blake, Chris, Kilbinger, Martin, Benjamin, Jonathan, Erben, Thomas, Hildebrandt, Hendrik, Hoekstra, Henk, Kitching, Thomas D., Mellier, Yannick, Miller, Lance, Van Waerbeke, Ludovic, Coupon, Jean, Fu, Liping, Harnois-Déraps, Joachim, Hudson, Michael J., Kuijken, Koenraad, Rowe, Barnaby, Schrabback, Tim, Semboloni, Elisabetta, Vafaei, Sanaz, Velander, Malin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astrophysics
Cosmology
Dark energy
Gravity
Red shift
Sciences of the Universe
Space telescopes
Universe
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Summary:Dark energy may be the first sign of new fundamental physics in the Universe, taking either a physical form or revealing a correction to Einsteinian gravity. Weak gravitational lensing and galaxy peculiar velocities provide complementary probes of general relativity, and in combination allow us to test modified theories of gravity in a unique way. We perform such an analysis by combining measurements of cosmic shear tomography from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) with the growth of structure from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey and the Six-degree-Field Galaxy Survey, producing the strongest existing joint constraints on the metric potentials that describe general theories of gravity. For scale-independent modifications to the metric potentials which evolve linearly with the effective dark energy density, we find present-day cosmological deviations in the Newtonian potential and curvature potential from the prediction of general relativity to be ΔΨ/Ψ = 0.05 ± 0.25 and ΔΦ/Φ = −0.05 ± 0.3, respectively (68 per cent confidence limits).
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966
DOI:10.1093/mnras/sts493