Solar System Test of the Nonlocal Gravity and the Necessity for a Screening Mechanism--Purple Mountain Observatory

Solar System Test of the Nonlocal Gravity and the Necessity for a Screening Mechanism

The idea of nonlocal theories of gravity has been employed to extend Einstein's general relativity and simulate the astrophysical dark matter. These corrections of the nonlocal gravity are characterized by two constant parameters: a dimensionless strength α and the fundamental length scale of the nonlocal gravity λ0. In the previous work, these two parameters were obtained by fitting the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. However, this results are not built on the newest and most accurate datesets of the solar system dynamics.

In the recent work, by using the supplementary advances in the perihelia provided by current INPOP10a and EPM2011 ephemerides, the authors find that INPOP10a yields the solar system’s bounds as α=(-0.6±12)×10-12 and λ0 =(0.2±2.1)×105Kpc, while EPM2011 gives α=(0.3±3.2)×10-12 and λ0 =(-0.4±1.7)×105Kpc (see the tables). Both of them are improved at least by about 5 times than previous results obtained by the rotation curves. As check of the estimation, the reducedχv2 of several cases are listed in table 3. With the parameters fitted to INPOP10a, χv2=0.5, and , in the case of EPM2011, χv2=4.8. According to this results, in order to be compatible with the current solar system ephemerides as well as explaining the rotation curves, the nonlocal gravity needs to be screened in the solar system.

By with DENG Xuemei

This work is published on Annals of Physics. And this research is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China and the National basic research program of China (No. 11473072) and the Fundamental Research Program of Jiangsu Province of China (No. BK20131461).