2017/05/22 by A. Hees, T. Do, A. M. Ghez +14 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.GA #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.118.211101
published as Phys. Rev. Letters 118, 211101, 2017 · 8 pages, 3 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Letters. Original title "Seeking a fifth force with..." changed upon request of the PRL editors
arxiv created 2017/05/22 · arxiv updated 2017/05/26
In this Letter, 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 |α| < 0.016 at a length scale of λ= 150 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 | ω_\textrmS0-2 |< 1.6 × 10-3 rad/yr, 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.