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We speculate on the development and availability of new innovative propulsion techniques in the 2040s, that will allow us to fly a spacecraft outside the Solar System (at 150 AU and more) in a reasonable amount of time, in order to directly probe our (gravitational) Solar System neighborhood and answer pressing questions regarding the dark sector (dark energy and dark matter). We identify two closely related main science goals, as well as secondary objectives that could be fulfilled by a mission dedicated to probing the local dark sector: (i) begin the exploration of gravitations low-acceleration regime with a man-made spacecraft and (ii) improve our knowledge of the local dark matter and baryon densities. Those questions can be answered by directly measuring the gravitational potential with an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft on an outbound Solar System orbit, and by comparing the spacecrafts trajectory with that predicted by General Relativity through the combination of ranging data and the in-situ measurement (and correction) of non-gravitational accelerations with an on-board accelerometer. Despite a wealth of new experiments getting online in the near future, that will bring new knowledge about the dark sector, it is very unlikely that those science questions will be closed in the next two decades. More importantly, it is likely that it will be even more urgent than currently to answer them. Tracking a spacecraft carrying a clock and an accelerometer as it leaves the Solar System may well be the easiest and fastest way to directly probe our dark environment.
A phenomenological attempt at alleviating the so-called coincidence problem is to allow the dark matter and dark energy to interact. By assuming a coupled quintessence scenario characterized by an interaction parameter $epsilon$, we investigate the p
We place observational constraints on two models within a class of scenarios featuring an elastic interaction between dark energy and dark matter that only produces momentum exchange up to first order in cosmological perturbations. The first one corr
The surface density and vertical distribution of stars, stellar remnants, and gas in the solar vicinity form important ingredients for understanding the star formation history of the Galaxy as well as for inferring the local density of dark matter by
We study the effect of an explicit interaction between two scalar fields components describing dark matter in the context of a recent proposal framework for interaction. We find that, even assuming a very small coupling, it is sufficient to explain t
We consider the models of vacuum energy interacting with cold dark matter in this study, in which the coupling can change sigh during the cosmological evolution. We parameterize the running coupling $b$ by the form $b(a)=b_0a+b_e(1-a)$, where at the