A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity

Abstract

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, has been precisely tested on Solar System scales, but the long-range nature of gravity is still poorly constrained. The nearby strong gravitational lens, ESO 325-G004, provides a laboratory to probe the weak-field regime of gravity and measure the spatial curvature generated per unit mass, $γ$. By reconstructing the observed light profile of the lensed arcs and the observed spatially resolved stellar kinematics with a single self-consistent model, we conclude that $γ= 0.97 \pm 0.09$ at 68% confidence. Our result is consistent with the prediction of 1 from General Relativity and provides a strong extragalactic constraint on the weak-field metric of gravity.

Published in Science. 42 pages, 10 figures including supplementary text and figures