2021/09/30 by Xiaohui Liu, Xiao-Hui Liu, Zhenhua Li +3 · 25 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Astrophysics #Computer science #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Einstein radius #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #General relativity #Gravitational lens #Lens (geology) #Optics #Parameterized complexity #Physics #Redshift #Scale (ratio) #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac4c3b
published in The Astrophysical Journal 927(1), 28 (IOP Publishing) · 11 pages, 4 figures; accepted by ApJ
arxiv created 2022/01/17 · openalex publication_date 2022/03/01 · arxiv updated 2022/03/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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 γPPN 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 γPPN. 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 γPPN=1.065+0.064-0.074, which is in good agreement with the prediction of γPPN=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.