Scientists are still coming up empty in the hunt for flaws in Einstein's
theory of general relativity that could explain the mysterious force driving
the accelerating expansion of the universe.
The researchers studied 100 million galaxies looking for signs that the
strength of gravity has varied throughout the universe's history or over
vast cosmic distances. Any sign of such a change would indicate that
Einstein's theory of general relativity is incomplete or in need of
revision. Variation could also shed light on what dark energy is, beyond
that it's the name scientists give to whatever is causing the expansion of
the universe to accelerate.
Despite finding no such variations in gravity's strength, the work will help
two forthcoming space telescopes — the the European Space Agency's Euclid
mission and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — also hunt for changes
in the strength of gravity through space and back through time.
"There is still room to challenge Einstein's theory of gravity, as
measurements get more and more precise," team member and former postdoctoral
researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Agnès Ferté, said in a
statement.
To see why dark energy and the universe's accelerating expansion is so
troubling to scientists, imagine pushing a child on a swing, watching her
slow down and come to an almost complete stop. Then suddenly the swing
suddenly speeds up and keeps moving faster without any push.
Scientists' equivalent is that the universe's expansion should be slowing
after the initial push of the Big Bang. But it isn't. It's accelerating, and
the term "dark energy" is a placeholder for the mysterious force driving
this acceleration.
As a result, dark energy is, in effect, working against the force of gravity
— pushing cosmic objects apart as gravity draws them together. And because
dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and matter
content, this is a mystery that researchers are eager to solve.
So the Dark Energy Survey crew used the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope
in Chile to look 5 billion years back in time.
Testing gravity through space and time
Light travels at a constant speed, meaning that astronomers see distant
cosmic objects as they were in the past.
For example, light takes roughly seven minutes to travel from the sun to
Earth, so from our planet we see our star as it was seven minutes ago.
Moving further afield, when astronomers look at a Milky Way object one
light-year away, they see as it was a year ago. And for some of the distant
galaxies that the James Webb Telescope is studying, light has been traveling
to us for tens of billions of years and we see the galaxies as they were
when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was in its relative infancy.
It isn't the observations of the galaxies themselves that could hint at
changes in the strength of gravity, however, but rather what has happened to
their light during its long journey to a telescope.
A foray into spacetime
According to general relativity, mass curves the very fabric of spacetime,
with objects of greater mass causing more extreme curvature. A common
analogy involves placing balls of various weights on a stretched rubber
sheet. A bowling ball creates a deeper dent in the sheet than a tennis ball;
a star warps spacetime more than a planet.
Objects like galaxies warp spacetime so strongly that as light passes a
galaxy, its path is curved. When this light reaches Earth, the object that
emitted it shifts in apparent position in the sky. Astronomers call the
effect gravitational lensing.
Because light from a background object can take different paths past a
massive object like a galaxy — referred to as a lensing object —
gravitational lensing can make the source appear distorted, magnified or
even in multiple places in the sky. (It's gravitational lensing that smeared
distant galaxies in the first image from the James Webb Space
Telescope.)
The effects of gravitational lensing can be more subtle, however, and these
subtle effects are often caused by dark matter in the lensing object. And
because dark matter interacts only with gravity, ignoring light and other
matter altogether, its shape and structure are caused by this force alone.
Einstein was right (again)
But back to the new research. The Dark Energy Survey scientists looked for
these subtle distortions, called 'weak gravitational lensing,' in images of
distant galaxies. The researchers reasoned that this would reveal changes in
the distribution of dark matter in lensing galaxies, which would in turn
hint at changes in the strength of gravity over time and space — perhaps
shedding light on the mysterious dark energy.
However, observations of the shape of dark matter in 100 million galaxies
showed everything still in keeping with Einstein's general relativity.
This doesn't mean the quest is over, however. Astronomers will now turn to
the Euclid and Roman space telescopes, set to launch in 2023 and 2027
respectively, to search for these variations in gravity in galaxies that are
still more ancient, hoping to spot changes that may set a course toward the
understanding of dark energy.
While this new study looked at galaxies as they were 5 billion years ago,
Euclid will look back 8 billion years, and Roman will look back even
further, observing galaxies as they were 11 billion years ago, according to
NASA.
"We still have so much to do before we're ready for Euclid and Roman," Ferté
said. "So it's essential we continue to collaborate with scientists around
the world on this problem as we've done with the Dark Energy Survey."
The team's results were presented on Aug. 23 at the International Conference
on Particle Physics and Cosmology (COSMO'22) in Rio de Janeiro. A paper
detailing the team's findings has been posted on the preprint repository
arXiv.org.