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Published December 1, 2015 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

Testing general relativity with present and future astrophysical observations

Abstract

One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity (GR) has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are theoretical and experimental reasons to believe that GR should be modified when gravitational fields are strong and spacetime curvature is large. The best astrophysical laboratories to probe strong-field gravity are black holes and neutron stars, whether isolated or in binary systems. We review the motivations to consider extensions of GR. We present a (necessarily incomplete) catalog of modified theories of gravity for which strong-field predictions have been computed and contrasted to Einstein's theory, and we summarize our current understanding of the structure and dynamics of compact objects in these theories. We discuss current bounds on modified gravity from binary pulsar and cosmological observations, and we highlight the potential of future gravitational wave measurements to inform us on the behavior of gravity in the strong-field regime.

Additional Information

© 2015 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 9 February 2015, revised 5 June 2015. Accepted for publication 3 August 2015. Published 1 December 2015. This review was conceived during a workshop funded by the FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Grant No. 295189 'NRHEP' [903]. We thank Marco Cavaglià, Neil Cornish, Luís Crispino and Nicolás Yunes for attending the workshop and for useful discussions. We are also grateful to Térence Delsate and Claudia de Rham for comments, and to Alessandro Nagar, Thibault Damour, Loic Villain, Michael Kramer and Fabian Schmidt for allowing us to use their figures. This work has been supported by the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 Grant No. 690904 'StronGrHEP,' the European Union's FP7 ERC Starting Grant 'The dynamics of black holes: testing the limits of Einstein's theory' grant agreement no. DyBHo-256667, H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant 'Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein's theory' grant agreement no. MaGRaTh–646597, the FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG Grant No. 293412 'CBHEO,' the FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG Grant PCIG11-GA-2012-321608 'GALFORMBHS,' the NSF Grants No. PHY-1055103, PHY-1260995, PHY-1306069 and PHY-1300903, the NASA Grant NNX13AH44G, the ERC-2011-StG Grant No. 279363–HiDGR, the FP7/2007-2013 ERC Grant No. 306425 'Challenging General Relativity', the DFG Research Training Group 1620 'Models of Gravity' FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Grant No. 606096, the STFC GR Consolidator Grant No. ST/L000636/1, the FCT-Portugal projects PTDC/FIS/116625/2010, CERN/FP/116341/2010, CERN/FP/123593/2011, IF/00293/2013, IF/00797/2014/CP1214/CT0012 and CIDMA strategic funding UID/MAT/04106/2013, the Marie Curie IEF contracts aStronGR-2011-298297 and AstroGRAphy-2013-623439, the COST Action MP1304 'NewCompStar,' a UIUC Fortner Fellowship, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) under grants 2011/11973-4 and 2013/14754-7, the NSF XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, the Cosmos system, part of DiRAC, funded by STFC and BIS under Grant Nos. ST/K00333X/1, ST/H008586/1, ST/J001341/1 and ST/J005673/1, and the CESGA-ICTS Grant No. 249. Computations have been performed on the 'Baltasar Sete-Sois' cluster at IST, the 'Venus' cluster at YITP, the COSMOS supercomputer, the Trestles cluster at SDSC, the Kraken cluster at NICS, and Finis Terrae at CESGA. T Baker is supported by All Souls College, Oxford. D Doneva would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for support. P G Ferreira acknowledges support from STFC, BIPAC and Oxford Martin School. D Gerosa is supported by the UK STFC and the Isaac Newton Studentship of the University of Cambridge. J Kunz acknowledges support from DFG Research Training Group 1620 'Models of Gravity' and FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Grant No. 606096. A Matas would like to thank Claudia de Rham and Andrew Tolley for many useful conversations and support. A Matas is supported by an NSF-GRFP fellowship. B S Sathyaprakash acknowledges the support of the LIGO Visitor Program through the National Science Foundation award PHY-0757058 and STFC grant ST/J000345/1. L C Stein acknowledges that support for this work was provided by the NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number PF2-130101 issued by the Chandra x-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060. This research was supported in part by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development & Innovation.

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August 20, 2023
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