2018/10/02 by Shuo Cao, Jingzhao Qi, Marek Biesiada +3 · 1 voice
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aae5f7
6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ
arxiv created 2018/10/02 · arxiv published 2018/10/02 · arxiv updated 2018/11/07
Probing the speed of light is as an important test of General Relativity but the measurements of c using objects in the distant universe have been almost completely unexplored. In this letter, we propose an idea to use the multiple measurements of galactic-scale strong gravitational lensing systems with type Ia supernova acting as background sources to estimate the speed of light. This provides an original method to measure the speed of light using objects located at different redshifts which emitted their light in a distant past. Moreover, we predict that strongly lensed SNe Ia observed by the LSST would produce robust constraints on Δc/c at the level of 10-3. We also discuss whether the future surveys such as LSST may succeed in detecting any hypothetical variation of c predicted by theories in which fundamental constants have dynamical nature.