Testing General Relativity with geodetic VLBI: what profit from a single, specially designed experiment?
Abstract
Context. We highlight the capabilities of the geodetic VLBI technique to test General relativity in the classical astrometric style, i.e., measuring the deflection of light in the vicinity of the Sun. Aims. In previous studies, the parameter was estimated by global analyses of thousands of geodetic VLBI sessions. Here we estimate from a single session where the Sun has approached two strong reference radio sources 0229+131 and 0235+164 at an elongation angle of 1-3 degrees. Methods. The AUA020 VLBI session of 1 May 2017 was designed to obtain more than 1000 group delays from the two radio sources. The Solar corona effect was effectively calibrated with the dual-frequency observations even at small elongation from the Sun. Results. We obtained with a precision better than what is obtained through global analyses of thousands of standard geodetic sessions over decades. Current results demonstrate that the modern VLBI technology is capable of establishing new limits on observational test of General Relativity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.11299,
title = {Testing General Relativity with geodetic VLBI: what profit from a single, specially designed experiment?},
author = {Oleg Titov and Anastasiia Girdiuk and Sebastien Lambert and Jim Lovell and Jamie McCallum and Stas Shabala and Lucia McCallum and David Mayer and Matthias Schartner and Aletta de Witt and Fengchun Shu and Alexei Melnikov and Dmitrii Ivanov and Andrei Mikhailov and Sangoh Yi and Benedikt Soja and Bo Xia and T Jiang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.11299},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics