scholarly journals Constraining scalar-tensor gravity models by S2 star orbits around the galactic center

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1, spec.issue) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Vesna Borka-Jovanovic ◽  
Predrag Jovanovic ◽  
Dusko Borka ◽  
Salvatore Capozziello ◽  
Stefania Gravina ◽  
...  

The aim of our investigation is to derive a particular theory among the class of scalar-tensor(ST) theories of gravity, and then to test it by studying kinematics and dynamics of S-stars around a supermassive black hole (BH) at Galactic Center (GC). We also discuss the Newtonian limit of this class of ST theories of gravity, as well as its parameters. We compare the observed orbit of S2 star with our simulated orbit which we obtained theoretically with the derived ST potential and constrained parameters. Using the obtained best-fit parameters we calculated orbital precession of S2 star in ST gravity and found that it has the same direction as in General Relativity (GR) but causes much larger pericenter shift.

Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 365 (6454) ◽  
pp. 664-668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuan Do ◽  
Aurelien Hees ◽  
Andrea Ghez ◽  
Gregory D. Martinez ◽  
Devin S. Chu ◽  
...  

The general theory of relativity predicts that a star passing close to a supermassive black hole should exhibit a relativistic redshift. In this study, we used observations of the Galactic Center star S0-2 to test this prediction. We combined existing spectroscopic and astrometric measurements from 1995–2017, which cover S0-2’s 16-year orbit, with measurements from March to September 2018, which cover three events during S0-2’s closest approach to the black hole. We detected a combination of special relativistic and gravitational redshift, quantified using the redshift parameter ϒ. Our result, ϒ = 0.88 ± 0.17, is consistent with general relativity (ϒ = 1) and excludes a Newtonian model (ϒ = 0) with a statistical significance of 5σ.


Science ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 338 (6103) ◽  
pp. 84-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Meyer ◽  
A. M. Ghez ◽  
R. Schödel ◽  
S. Yelda ◽  
A. Boehle ◽  
...  

Stars with short orbital periods at the center of our Galaxy offer a powerful probe of a supermassive black hole. Over the past 17 years, the W. M. Keck Observatory has been used to image the galactic center at the highest angular resolution possible today. By adding to this data set and advancing methodologies, we have detected S0-102, a star orbiting our Galaxy’s supermassive black hole with a period of just 11.5 years. S0-102 doubles the number of known stars with full phase coverage and periods of less than 20 years. It thereby provides the opportunity, with future measurements, to resolve degeneracies in the parameters describing the central gravitational potential and to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity in an unexplored regime.


2017 ◽  
Vol 118 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Hees ◽  
T. Do ◽  
A. M. Ghez ◽  
G. D. Martinez ◽  
S. Naoz ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Sharif ◽  
Sehrish Iftikhar

This paper is devoted to studying two interesting issues of a black hole with string cloud background. Firstly, we investigate null geodesics and find unstable orbital motion of particles. Secondly, we calculate deflection angle in strong field limit. We then find positions, magnifications, and observables of relativistic images for supermassive black hole at the galactic center. We conclude that string parameter highly affects the lensing process and results turn out to be quite different from the Schwarzschild black hole.


2017 ◽  
Vol 847 (1) ◽  
pp. 80 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Witzel ◽  
B. N. Sitarski ◽  
A. M. Ghez ◽  
M. R. Morris ◽  
A. Hees ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 875 (1) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhenlin Zhu ◽  
Zhiyuan Li ◽  
Mark R. Morris ◽  
Shuo Zhang ◽  
Siming Liu

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. eaaz1310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Johnson ◽  
Alexandru Lupsasca ◽  
Andrew Strominger ◽  
George N. Wong ◽  
Shahar Hadar ◽  
...  

The Event Horizon Telescope image of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is dominated by a bright, unresolved ring. General relativity predicts that embedded within this image lies a thin “photon ring,” which is composed of an infinite sequence of self-similar subrings that are indexed by the number of photon orbits around the black hole. The subrings approach the edge of the black hole “shadow,” becoming exponentially narrower but weaker with increasing orbit number, with seemingly negligible contributions from high-order subrings. Here, we show that these subrings produce strong and universal signatures on long interferometric baselines. These signatures offer the possibility of precise measurements of black hole mass and spin, as well as tests of general relativity, using only a sparse interferometric array.


2018 ◽  
Vol 191 ◽  
pp. 01010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Zakharov

To evaluate a potential usually one analyzes trajectories of test particles. For the Galactic Center case astronomers use bright stars or photons, so there are two basic observational techniques to investigate a gravitational potential, namely, (a) monitoring the orbits of bright stars near the Galactic Center as it is going on with 10m Keck twin and four 8m VLT telescopes equipped with adaptive optics facilities (in addition, recently the IR interferometer GRAVITY started to operate with VLT); (b) measuring the size and shape of shadows around black hole with VLBI-technique using telescopes operating in mm-band. At the moment, one can use a small relativistic correction approach for stellar orbit analysis, however, in the future the approximation will not be precise enough due to enormous progress of observational facilities and recently the GRAVITY team found that the first post-Newtonian correction has to be taken into account for the gravitational redshift in the S2 star orbit case. Meanwhile for smallest structure analysis in VLBI observations one really needs a strong gravitational field approximation. We discuss results of observations and their interpretations. In spite of great efforts there is a very slow progress to resolve dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE) puzzles and in these circumstances in last years a number of alternative theories of gravity have been proposed. Parameters of these theories could be effectively constrained with of observations of the Galactic Center. We show some cases of alternative theories of gravity where their parameters are constrained with observations, in particular, we consider massive theory of gravity. We choose the alternative theory of gravity since there is a significant activity in this field and in the last years theorists demonstrated an opportunity to create such theories without ghosts, on the other hand, recently, the joint LIGO & Virgo team presented an upper limit on graviton mass such as mg< 1:2 × 10-22eV [1] analyzing gravitational wave signal in their first paper where they reported about the discovery of gravitational waves from binary black holes as it was suggested by C. Will [2]. So, the authors concluded that their observational data do not indicate a significant deviation from classical general relativity. We show that an analysis of bright star trajectories could estimate a graviton mass with a commensurable accuracy in comparison with an approach used in gravitational wave observations and the estimates obtained with these two approaches are consistent. Therefore, such an analysis gives an opportunity to treat observations of bright stars near the Galactic Center as a useful tool to obtain constraints on the fundamental gravity law. We showed that in the future graviton mass estimates obtained with analysis of trajectories of bright stars would be better than current LIGO bounds on the value, therefore, based on a potential reconstruction at the Galactic Center we obtain bounds on a graviton mass and these bounds are comparable with LIGO constraints. Analyzing size of shadows around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center (or/and in the center of M87) one could constrain parameters of different alternative theories of gravity as well.


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