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.
@article{arxiv.1806.08300,
title = {A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity},
author = {Thomas E. Collett and Lindsay J. Oldham and Russell J. Smith and Matthew W. Auger and Kyle B. Westfall and David Bacon and Robert C. Nichol and Karen L. Masters and Kazuya Koyama and Remco van den Bosch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.08300},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
Published in Science. 42 pages, 10 figures including supplementary text and figures