A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity

A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, has been precisely tested on Solar System scales, but the long-range nature of gravity is still poorly constrained. The nearby strong gravitational lens ESO 325-G004 provides a laboratory to probe the weak-field regime of gravity and measure the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2018-06, Vol.360 (6395), p.1342-1346
Main Authors: Collett, Thomas E, Oldham, Lindsay J, Smith, Russell J, Auger, Matthew W, Westfall, Kyle B, Bacon, David, Nichol, Robert C, Masters, Karen L, Koyama, Kazuya, van den Bosch, Remco
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Curvature
Galaxies
Galaxy distribution
Gravitation
Gravitational lenses
Kinematics
Mass distribution
Relativity
Solar system
Stellar kinematics
Theory of relativity
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Summary:Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, has been precisely tested on Solar System scales, but the long-range nature of gravity is still poorly constrained. The nearby strong gravitational lens ESO 325-G004 provides a laboratory to probe the weak-field regime of gravity and measure the spatial curvature generated per unit mass, γ. By reconstructing the observed light profile of the lensed arcs and the observed spatially resolved stellar kinematics with a single self-consistent model, we conclude that γ = 0.97 ± 0.09 at 68% confidence. Our result is consistent with the prediction of 1 from General Relativity and provides a strong extragalactic constraint on the weak-field metric of gravity.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203