Abstract
We demonstrate that short-period stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic center can successfully be used to probe the gravitational theory in a strong regime. We use 19 years of observations of the two best measured short-period stars orbiting our Galactic center to constrain a hypothetical fifth force that arises in various scenarios motivated by the development of a unification theory or in some models of dark matter and dark energy. No deviation from general relativity is reported and the fifth force strength is restricted to an upper 95% confidence limit of at a length scale of astronomical units. We also derive a 95% confidence upper limit on a linear drift of the argument of periastron of the short-period star S0-2 of , which can be used to constrain various gravitational and astrophysical theories. This analysis provides the first fully self-consistent test of the gravitational theory using orbital dynamic in a strong gravitational regime, that of a supermassive black hole. A sensitivity analysis for future measurements is also presented.
- Received 22 December 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.211101
© 2017 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
Restricting the Fifth Force
Published 25 May 2017
Observations of the orbits of two stars at the center of the Milky Way constrain gravitational models involving a hypothetical fifth force.
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