scholarly journals A Test of Gravitational Theories Including Torsion with the BepiColombo Radio Science Experiment

Universe ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Giulia Schettino ◽  
Daniele Serra ◽  
Giacomo Tommei ◽  
Vincenzo Di Pierri

Within the framework of the relativity experiment of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, which was launched at the end of 2018, we describe how a test of alternative theories of gravity, including torsion can be set up. Following March et al. (2011), the effects of a non-vanishing spacetime torsion have been parameterized by three torsion parameters, t1, t2, and t3. These parameters can be estimated within a global least squares fit, together with a number of parameters of interest, such as post-Newtonian parameters γ and β, and the orbits of Mercury and the Earth. The simulations have been performed by means of the ORBIT14 orbit determination software, which was developed by the Celestial Mechanics Group of the University of Pisa for the analysis of the BepiColombo radio science experiment. We claim that the torsion parameters can be determined by means of the relativity experiment of BepiColombo at the level of some parts in 10−4, which is a significant result for constraining gravitational theories that allow spacetime torsion.

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (12) ◽  
pp. 1544021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Sakstein ◽  
Kazuya Koyama

The Vainshtein mechanism is of paramount importance in many alternative theories of gravity. It hides deviations from general relativity (GR) in the solar system while allowing them to drive the acceleration of the cosmic expansion. Recently, a class of theories have emerged where the mechanism is broken inside astrophysical objects. In this essay, we look for novel probes of these theories by deriving the modified properties of stars and galaxies. We show that main-sequence stars are colder, less luminous and more ephemeral than GR predicts. Furthermore, the circular velocities of objects orbiting inside galaxies are slower and the lensing of light is weaker. We discuss the prospects for testing these theories using the novel phenomena presented here in light of current astrophysical surveys.


2018 ◽  
Vol 191 ◽  
pp. 01010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Zakharov

To evaluate a potential usually one analyzes trajectories of test particles. For the Galactic Center case astronomers use bright stars or photons, so there are two basic observational techniques to investigate a gravitational potential, namely, (a) monitoring the orbits of bright stars near the Galactic Center as it is going on with 10m Keck twin and four 8m VLT telescopes equipped with adaptive optics facilities (in addition, recently the IR interferometer GRAVITY started to operate with VLT); (b) measuring the size and shape of shadows around black hole with VLBI-technique using telescopes operating in mm-band. At the moment, one can use a small relativistic correction approach for stellar orbit analysis, however, in the future the approximation will not be precise enough due to enormous progress of observational facilities and recently the GRAVITY team found that the first post-Newtonian correction has to be taken into account for the gravitational redshift in the S2 star orbit case. Meanwhile for smallest structure analysis in VLBI observations one really needs a strong gravitational field approximation. We discuss results of observations and their interpretations. In spite of great efforts there is a very slow progress to resolve dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE) puzzles and in these circumstances in last years a number of alternative theories of gravity have been proposed. Parameters of these theories could be effectively constrained with of observations of the Galactic Center. We show some cases of alternative theories of gravity where their parameters are constrained with observations, in particular, we consider massive theory of gravity. We choose the alternative theory of gravity since there is a significant activity in this field and in the last years theorists demonstrated an opportunity to create such theories without ghosts, on the other hand, recently, the joint LIGO & Virgo team presented an upper limit on graviton mass such as mg< 1:2 × 10-22eV [1] analyzing gravitational wave signal in their first paper where they reported about the discovery of gravitational waves from binary black holes as it was suggested by C. Will [2]. So, the authors concluded that their observational data do not indicate a significant deviation from classical general relativity. We show that an analysis of bright star trajectories could estimate a graviton mass with a commensurable accuracy in comparison with an approach used in gravitational wave observations and the estimates obtained with these two approaches are consistent. Therefore, such an analysis gives an opportunity to treat observations of bright stars near the Galactic Center as a useful tool to obtain constraints on the fundamental gravity law. We showed that in the future graviton mass estimates obtained with analysis of trajectories of bright stars would be better than current LIGO bounds on the value, therefore, based on a potential reconstruction at the Galactic Center we obtain bounds on a graviton mass and these bounds are comparable with LIGO constraints. Analyzing size of shadows around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center (or/and in the center of M87) one could constrain parameters of different alternative theories of gravity as well.


2018 ◽  
Vol 97 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantinos F. Dialektopoulos ◽  
Antonios Nathanail ◽  
Athanasios G. Tzikas

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (03) ◽  
pp. 1430004 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL KRAMER

In the quest of understanding gravity, binary pulsars provide indispensable laboratories for precision tests of gravity. Effects that can be studied in great detail include the emission of gravitational waves, Shapiro delay, orbital precession and more. But also fundamental differences between general relativity and alternative theories of gravity can be probed, such as possible violations of the strong equivalence principle, preferred frame effects or the existence of gravitational dipole radiation or scalar fields. Also the effects of spin precession in strongly self-gravitating bodies can be studied by observing effects of geodetic precession.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander F. Zakharov ◽  
Victor N. Pervushin ◽  
Francesco De Paolis ◽  
Gabriele Ingrosso ◽  
Achille A. Nucita ◽  
...  

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