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 spatial curvature generated per unit mass, . 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 = 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.

Source: ScienceNOW - June 21, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Collett, T. E., Oldham, L. J., Smith, R. J., Auger, M. W., Westfall, K. B., Bacon, D., Nichol, R. C., Masters, K. L., Koyama, K., van den Bosch, R. Tags: Astronomy, Physics reports Source Type: news