Exploring the presence of a fifth force at the Galactic Center

Abstract

Aims: The presence of a Yukawa-like correction to Newtonian gravity is investigated at the Galactic Center, leading to a new upper limit for the intensity of such a correction. Methods: We perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis using the astrometric and spectroscopic data of star S$2$ collected at the Very Large Telescope by GRAVITY, NACO and SINFONI instruments, covering the period from $1992$ to $2022$. Results: The precision of the GRAVITY instrument allows us to derive the most stringent upper limit at the Galactic Center for the intensity of the Yukawa contribution ($\propto \hat{I}\pm e^{-\hat{I}»r}$) to be $|\hat{I}\pm |<0.003$ for a scale length $\hat{I}»=3\cdot 10^{13}\mathrm{m}(\sim 200\mathrm{AU})$. This improves by roughly one order of magnitude all estimates obtained in previous works.

Updated to match published version. Accepted on A&A