Cookies

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. By continuing to browse this repository, you give consent for essential cookies to be used. You can read more about our Privacy and Cookie Policy.


Durham Research Online
You are in:

A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity.

Collett, Thomas E. and Oldham, Lindsay J. and Smith, Russell J. and Auger, Matthew W. and Westfall, Kyle B. and Bacon, David and Nichol, Robert C. and Masters, Karen L. and Koyama, Kazuya and van den Bosch, Remco (2018) 'A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity.', Science., 360 (6395). pp. 1342-1346.

Abstract

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.

Item Type:Article
Full text:(AM) Accepted Manuscript
Download PDF
(2557Kb)
Status:Peer-reviewed
Publisher Web site:https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2469
Publisher statement:This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 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 (2018). A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity. Science 360(6395): 1342-1346. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2469
Date accepted:26 April 2018
Date deposited:10 July 2018
Date of first online publication:22 June 2018
Date first made open access:10 July 2018

Save or Share this output

Export:
Export
Look up in GoogleScholar