A New Independent Limit on the Cosmological Constant/Dark Energy from the Relativistic Bending of Light by Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies

Abstract

We derive new limits on the value of the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, based on the Einstein bending of light by systems where the lens is a distant galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. We use an amended lens equation in which the contribution of $\Lambda$ to the Einstein deflection angle is taken into account and use observations of Einstein radii around several lens systems. We use in our calculations a Schwarzschild-de Sitter vacuole exactly matched into a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background and show that a $\Lambda$-contribution term appears in the deflection angle within the lens equation. We find that the contribution of the $\Lambda$-term to the bending angle is larger than the second-order term for many lens systems. Using these observations of bending angles, we derive new limits on the value of $\Lambda$. These limits constitute the best observational upper bound on $\Lambda$ after cosmological constraints and are only two orders of magnitude away from the value determined by those cosmological constraints.

5 pages, 1 figure, matches version published in MNRAS

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• Report of the Dark Energy Task Force
• Combining Strong and Weak Gravitational Lensing in Abell 1689
• The Contribution of the Cosmological Constant to the Relativistic Bending of Light Revisited
• Solar system effects in Schwarzschild--de Sitter spacetime
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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Light Deflection, Lensing, and Time Delays from Gravitational Potentials and Fermat's Principle in the Presence of a Cosmological Constant
• Exact gravitational lensing in conformal gravity and Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime
• The Vacuole Model: New Terms in the Second Order Deflection of Light
• Newtonian analogue of Schwarzschild de-Sitter spacetime: Influence on the local kinematics in galaxies
• Light bending by the cosmological constant
• Leading-order deflection of particles by a moving Schwarzschild lens with a two-dimensional velocity
• Dark Energy on Astrophysical Scales and Its Detection in the Milky Way
• Total light bending in non-asymptotically flat black hole spacetimes
• Mass decomposition of SLACS lens galaxies in Weyl conformal gravity
• Gravitational Lensing from a Spacetime Perspective
• Strong lensing with positive cosmological constant
• Effect of the spatial curvature on light bending and time delay in curved Einstein-Straus--de Sitter spacetime
• Probing dark fluids and modified gravity with gravitational lensing
• Leading-order gravitational time delay of massive particles by a moving Schwarzschild lens
• Deflection of light and time delay in hyperbolic Einstein-Straus--de Sitter solution
• Deflection and gravitational lensing of null and timelike signals in general asymptotically (anti-)de Sitter spacetimes