Testing General Relativity with Present and Future Astrophysical Observations
Abstract
One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are theoretical and experimental reasons to believe that general relativity should be modified when gravitational fields are strong and spacetime curvature is large. The best astrophysical laboratories to probe strong-field gravity are black holes and neutron stars, whether isolated or in binary systems. We review the motivations to consider extensions of general relativity. We present a (necessarily incomplete) catalog of modified theories of gravity for which strong-field predictions have been computed and contrasted to Einstein's theory, and we summarize our current understanding of the structure and dynamics of compact objects in these theories. We discuss current bounds on modified gravity from binary pulsar and cosmological observations, and we highlight the potential of future gravitational wave measurements to inform us on the behavior of gravity in the strong-field regime.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.07274,
title = {Testing General Relativity with Present and Future Astrophysical Observations},
author = {Emanuele Berti and Enrico Barausse and Vitor Cardoso and Leonardo Gualtieri and Paolo Pani and Ulrich Sperhake and Leo C. Stein and Norbert Wex and Kent Yagi and Tessa Baker and C. P. Burgess and Flávio S. Coelho and Daniela Doneva and Antonio De Felice and Pedro G. Ferreira and Paulo C. C. Freire and James Healy and Carlos Herdeiro and Michael Horbatsch and Burkhard Kleihaus and Antoine Klein and Kostas Kokkotas and Jutta Kunz and Pablo Laguna and Ryan N. Lang and Tjonnie G. F. Li and Tyson Littenberg and Andrew Matas and Saeed Mirshekari and Hirotada Okawa and Eugen Radu and Richard O'Shaughnessy and Bangalore S. Sathyaprakash and Chris Van Den Broeck and Hans A. Winther and Helvi Witek and Mir Emad Aghili and Justin Alsing and Brett Bolen and Luca Bombelli and Sarah Caudill and Liang Chen and Juan Carlos Degollado and Ryuichi Fujita and Caixia Gao and Davide Gerosa and Saeed Kamali and Hector O. Silva and João G. Rosa and Laleh Sadeghian and Marco Sampaio and Hajime Sotani and Miguel Zilhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.07274},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
188 pages, 46 figures, 6 tables, 903 references. Matches version published in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Supplementary data files available at http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/~berti/research/ and http://centra.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/network/grit/files/