Testing General Relativity with stellar orbits around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic center

Abstract

In this Letter, we demonstrate that short-period stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center can successfully be used to probe the gravitational theory in a strong regime. We use 19 years of observations of the two best measured short-period stars orbiting our Galactic Center to constrain a hypothetical fifth force that arises in various scenarios motivated by the development of a unification theory or in some models of dark matter and dark energy. No deviation from General Relativity is reported and the fifth force strength is restricted to an upper 95% confidence limit of $\left|\alpha \right|<0.016$ at a length scale of $\lambda =$ 150 astronomical units. We also derive a 95% confidence upper limit on a linear drift of the argument of periastron of the short-period star S0-2 of $\left|{\dot{\omega }}_{\text{S0-2}}\right|<1.6\times 10^{-3}$ rad/yr, which can be used to constrain various gravitational and astrophysical theories. This analysis provides the first fully self-consistent test of the gravitational theory using orbital dynamic in a strong gravitational regime, that of a supermassive black hole. A sensitivity analysis for future measurements is also presented.

8 pages, 3 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Letters. Original title "Seeking a fifth force with..." changed upon request of the PRL editors

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