No Arabic abstract
The main science driver for the coming generation of cosmological surveys is understanding dark energy which relies on testing General Relativity on the largest scales. Once we move beyond the simplest explanation for dark energy of a cosmological constant, the space of possible theories becomes both vast and extremely hard to compute realistic observables. A key discriminator of a cosmological constant, however, is that the growth of structure is scale-invariant on large scales. By carefully weighting observables derived from distributions of galaxies and a dipole pattern in their apparent sizes, we construct a null test which vanishes for any model of gravity or dark energy where the growth of structure is scale-independent. It relies only on very few assumptions about cosmology, and does not require any modelling of the growth of structure. We show that with a survey like DESI a scale-dependence of the order of 10-20 percent can be detected at 3 sigma with the null test, which will drop by a factor of 2 for a survey like the Square Kilometre Array. We also show that the null test is very insensitive to typical uncertainties in other cosmological parameters including massive neutrinos and scale-dependent bias, making this a key null test for dark energy.
Although general relativity (GR) has been precisely tested at the solar system scale, precise tests at a galactic or cosmological scale are still relatively insufficient. Here, in order to test GR at the galactic scale, we use the newly compiled galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing (SGL) sample to constrain the parameter $gamma_{PPN}$ in the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. We employ the Pantheon sample of type Ia supernovae observation to calibrate the distances in the SGL systems using the Gaussian Process method, which avoids the logical problem caused by assuming a cosmological model within GR to determine the distances in the SGL sample. Furthermore, we consider three typical lens models in this work to investigate the influences of the lens mass distributions on the fitting results. We find that the choice of the lens models has a significant impact on the constraints on the PPN parameter $gamma_{PPN}$. We use the Bayesian information criterion as an evaluation tool to make a comparison for the fitting results of the three lens models, and we find that the most reliable lens model gives the result of $gamma_{PPN}=1.065^{+0.064}_{-0.074}$, which is in good agreement with the prediction of $gamma_{PPN}=1$ by GR. As far as we know, our 6.4% constraint result is the best result so far among the recent works using the SGL method.
S-stars in the Galactic Center are excellent testbeds of various general relativistic effects. While previous works focus on modeling their orbital motion around Sgr A*--the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center--here we explore the possibility of using the rotation of S-stars to test the de Sitter precession predicted by general relativity. We show that by reorienting the rotation axes of S-stars, de Sitter precession will change the apparent width of the absorption lines in the stellar spectra. Our numerical simulations suggest that the newly discovered S4714 and S62 are best suited for such a test because of their small pericenter distances relative to Sgr A*. Depending on the initial inclination of the star, the line width would vary by as much as $20-76,{rm km,s^{-1}}$ within a period of $20-40$ years. Such a variation is comparable to the current detection limit. Since the precession rate is sensitive to the orbital eccentricity and stellar quadrupole structure, monitoring the rotation of S-stars could also help us better constrain the orbital elements of the S-stars and their internal structures.
Einsteins 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, $gamma$. 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 $gamma = 0.97 pm 0.09$ 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.
The weak equivalence principle is one of the cornerstone of general relativity. Its validity has been tested with impressive precision in the Solar System, with experiments involving baryonic matter and light. However, on cosmological scales and when dark matter is concerned, the validity of this principle is still unknown. In this paper we construct a null test that probes the validity of the equivalence principle for dark matter. Our test has the strong advantage that it can be applied on data without relying on any modelling of the theory of gravity. It involves a combination of redshift-space distortions and relativistic effects in the galaxy number-count fluctuation, that vanishes if and only if the equivalence principle holds. We show that the null test is very insensitive to typical uncertainties in other cosmological parameters, including the magnification bias parameter, and to non-linear effects, making this a robust null test for modified gravity.
We construct a consistency test of General Relativity (GR) on cosmological scales. This test enables us to distinguish between the two alternatives to explain the late-time accelerated expansion of the universe, that is, dark energy models based on GR and modified gravity models without dark energy. We derive the consistency relation in GR which is written only in terms of observables - the Hubble parameter, the density perturbations, the peculiar velocities and the lensing potential. The breakdown of this consistency relation implies that the Newton constant which governs large-scale structure is different from that in the background cosmology, which is a typical feature in modified gravity models. We propose a method to perform this test by reconstructing the weak lensing spectrum from measured density perturbations and peculiar velocities. This reconstruction relies on Poissons equation in GR to convert the density perturbations to the lensing potential. Hence any inconsistency between the reconstructed lensing spectrum and the measured lensing spectrum indicates the failure of GR on cosmological scales. The difficulties in performing this test using actual observations are discussed.