Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session T02: Tests of General Relativity IIInvited
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Sponsoring Units: DGRAV Chair: Nico Yunes, Montana State University Room: Sheraton Plaza D |
Monday, April 15, 2019 3:30PM - 4:06PM |
T02.00001: General relativistic effects around the Galactic Center black hole Invited Speaker: Frank Eisenhauer The Galactic Center offers the unique possibility to quantitatively test general relativity in the so-far unexplored regime close to a massive black hole. Here we present the results from the last two years of GRAVITY observations, in particular (1) the detection of the gravitational redshift in the orbit of the star S2, and (2) the orbital motion of matter close to the last stable orbit during a flare. The GRAVITY instrument, which we have developed specifically for the observations of the Galactic Center black hole and its orbiting stars, is now routinely achieving ~3 milli-arcsec imaging interferometry and with a sensitivity several hundred times better than previous instruments. Its astrometric precision of few ten micro-arcseconds corresponds to only few Schwarzschild radii of Galactic Center massive black hole, which opens up the possibility to test the fundamentals of gravity, all the way from the underlying equivalence principles, to considerations on new physics and their characteristic scales and strengths. The Galactic Center is and will remain the Rosetta-stone for deciphering strong gravity around massive black holes. |
Monday, April 15, 2019 4:06PM - 4:42PM |
T02.00002: Gravitational-wave Tests of General Relativity: Present and Future Invited Speaker: Kent Yagi Compact binary merger events recently discovered by the LIGO and Virgo Collaboration offer us excellent testbeds for probing fundamental physics. In this talk, I will first review the current status of testing extreme (strong and dynamical-field) gravity with gravitational waves from binary black hole and binary neutron star mergers that was previously inaccessible. In particular, I will explain how well one can probe various fundamental pillars in General Relativity. I will next review how these tests will improve in future and what kinds of new tests are possible once space-borne interferometers, such as LISA, are in operation. |
Monday, April 15, 2019 4:42PM - 5:18PM |
T02.00003: Recent and Future Tests of GR using Pulsar Systems Invited Speaker: Scott Ransom Pulsars are some of physics and astrophysics' most exotic objects, and they have proven to be exquisite tools for testing theories of gravity. The numbers of known pulsars, including those in binary or even triple systems, has more than doubled over the past decade, and promises to double again in the next. A small fraction of these systems have properties which allow them to probe GR or other theories in regimes which are incredibly hard to test otherwise. As an example, recently, a millisecond pulsar in a triple system has made the best test of the GR's Strong Equivalence Principle. In the (hopefully near) future, we will use compact pulsar binaries to test gravity at higher post-Newtonian order and will detect pulsar-black hole systems which will allow tests of fundamental black hole properties (such as the No-Hair Theorem). These results depend on keeping current "pulsar-centric" radio telescopes operational as well as the construction of much larger radio facilities (such as the SKA and ngVLA). |
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