Black hole based tests of general relativity
219 citations recorded by the source corpus.
General relativity has passed all solar system experiments and neutron star based tests, such as binary pulsar observations, with flying colors. A more exotic arena for testing general relativity is in systems that contain one or more black holes. Black holes are the most compact objects in the Universe, providing probes of the strongest-possible gravitational fields. We are motivated to study strong-field gravity since many theories give large deviations from general relativity only at large field strengths, while recovering the weak-field behavior. In this article, we review how one can probe general relativity and various alternative theories of gravity by using electromagnetic waves from a black hole with an accretion disk, and gravitational waves from black hole binaries. We first review model-independent ways of testing gravity with electromagnetic/gravitational waves from a black hole system. We then focus on selected examples of theories that extend general relativity in rather simple ways. Some important characteristics of general relativity include (but are not limited to) (i) only tensor gravitational degrees of freedom, (ii) the graviton is massless, (iii) no quadratic or higher curvatures in the action, and (iv) the theory is four-dimensional. Altering a characteristic leads to a different extension of general relativity: (i) scalar–tensor theories, (ii) massive gravity theories, (iii) quadratic gravity, and (iv) theories with large extra dimensions. Within each theory, we describe black hole solutions, their properties, and current and projected constraints on each theory using black hole based tests of gravity. We close this review by listing some of the open problems in model-independent tests and within each specific theory.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88fc11a66cf6e9db46580cbfb208f4d01f117261
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Michela Mapelli
- D. Holz
- Ilya Mandel
- N. Giacobbo
- Maya Fishbach
- N. Yunes
- Kent Yagi
- Krzysztof Belczyński
Citations in the corpus
- The tune of love and the nature(ness) of spacetime (2016, background): “[50, 51], although this is not the route advocated here.”
- Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “Much work has already appeared examining the implications of these initial detections [477, 473, 3].”
- Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, background): “The detection of a recycled radio pulsar orbiting a BH would be of great interest, for example, to test theories of gravity (Wex & Kopeikin 1999; Liu et al. 2014; Shao et al. 2015; Yagi & Stein 2016).”
- Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, methodology): “This is the case of Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet (Sotiriou and Zhou, 2014) and dynamical Chern-Simons gravity (Jackiw and Pi, 2003), archetypical examples of theories studied in numerical relativity (Benkel et al., 2016; Yagi and Stein, 2016).”
- Tests of general relativity with the binary black hole signals from the LIGO-Virgo catalog GWTC-1 (2019, background): “, alternative theories of gravity where an additional scalar charge is sourced by terms related to curvature [102,103].”
- Approximate Universal Relations for Neutron Stars and Quark Stars (2016, methodology): “We next review applications of the universal I-Love-Q relations aimed at probing extreme gravity [278, 279, 411, 412], i.”