Search results for "Gravitational field"
showing 10 items of 48 documents
The BepiColombo MORE gravimetry and rotation experiments with the ORBIT14 software
2016
The BepiColombo mission to Mercury is an ESA/JAXA cornerstone mission, consisting of two spacecraft in orbit around Mercury addressing several scientific issues. One spacecraft is the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, with full instrumentation to perform radio science experiments. Very precise radio tracking from Earth, on-board accelerometer and optical measurements will provide large data sets. From these it will be possible to study the global gravity field of Mercury and its tidal variations, its rotation state and the orbit of its centre of mass. With the gravity field and rotation state, it is possible to constrain the internal structure of the planet. With the orbit of Mercury, it is possib…
A dust-enshrouded tidal disruption event with a resolved radio jet in a galaxy merger
2018
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are transient flares produced when a star is ripped apart by the gravitational field of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). We have observed a transient source in the western nucleus of the merging galaxy pair Arp 299 that radiated >1.5 × 10 erg at infrared and radio wavelengths but was not luminous at optical or x-ray wavelengths. We interpret this as a TDE with much of its emission reradiated at infrared wavelengths by dust. Efficient reprocessing by dense gas and dust may explain the difference between theoretical predictions and observed luminosities of TDEs. The radio observations resolve an expanding and decelerating jet, probing the jet formation and evol…
Approaches to relativistic positioning around Earth and error estimations
2016
In the context of relativistic positioning, the coordinates of a given user may be calculated by using suitable information broadcast by a 4-tuple of satellites. Our 4-tuples belong to the Galileo constellation. Recently, we estimated the positioning errors due to uncertainties in the satellite world lines (U-errors). A distribution of U-errors was obtained, at various times, in a set of points covering a large region surrounding Earth. Here, the positioning errors associated to the simplifying assumption that photons move in Minkowski space-time (S-errors) are estimated and compared with the U-errors. Both errors have been calculated for the same points and times to make comparisons possib…
Can gravity perturbations explain QPOs?
2007
We show the results of some numerical simulations trying to reproduce the QPO behavior in black hole and neutron star sources. Our simulations are based on the idea that a nearly periodic luminosity oscillation can be obtained from a perturbation of the source gravitational field with a sinusoidal time behavior. We find that some specific features of the QPO phenomenon can be described by this simple model, but the required amplitude of the gravity perturbation is more than 1% of the unperturbed gravitational field. If the hypothesis is formed that such a perturbation is due to a density fluctuation (of the accretion disk or the source itself, in the case of the neutron star) going around t…
Epistemic Relativity: An Experimental Approach to Physics
2019
The recent concept of relativistic positioning system (RPS) has opened the possibility of making Relativity the general standard frame in which to state any physical problem, theoretical or experimental. Because the velocity of propagation of the information is finite, epistemic relativity proposes to integrate the physicist as a truly component of every physical problem, taking into account explicitly what information, when and where, the physicist is able to know. This leads naturally to the concept of relativistic stereometric system (RSS), allowing to measure the intrinsic properties of physical systems. Together, RPSs and RSSs complete the notion of laboratory in general relativity, al…
Towards a test of the weak equivalence principle of gravity using anti-hydrogen at CERN
2016
International audience; The aim of the GBAR (Gravitational Behavior of Antimatter at Rest) experiment is to measure the free fall acceleration of an antihydrogen atom, in the terrestrial gravitational field at CERN and therefore test the Weak Equivalence Principle with antimatter. The aim is to measure the local gravity with a 1% uncertainty which can be reduced to few parts of 10-3.
Violation of the equivalence principle from light scalar dark matter
2018
In this paper, we study the local observational consequences of a violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle induced by models of light scalar Dark Matter (DM). We focus on two different models where the scalar field couples linearly or quadratically to the standard model of matter fields. For both these cases, we derive the solutions of the scalar field. We also derive from first principles the expressions for two types of observables: (i) the local comparison of two atomic sensors that are differently sensitive to the constants of Nature and (ii) the local differential acceleration between two test-masses with different compositions. For the linear coupling, we recover that the signa…
Debating Relativistic Cosmology, 1917–1924
2018
Physical astronomy as we know it today matured during the latter half of the twentieth century. It was preceded by a period Jean Eisenstaedt has dubbed the “low water mark” in general relativity (GR), covering roughly the period 1925 to 1955 (Eisenstaedt 1988b). Starting in the 1960s, however, a series of startling developments helped pave the way for what has since been called the “renaissance of general relativity,” which suddenly took on great significance for astrophysics and cosmology. In the days of Einstein and Eddington, one could imagine a gravitational field so strong that it would produce a black hole, a true space–time singularity. People talked about such things, but hardly any…
Gravitational scattering on a global monopole
1991
The scattering amplitude and the total scattering cross section of massless particles propagating in the gravitational field of a global monopole are derived. We find that the physical signature of such defects is a ringlike angular region where the scattering amplitude is very large. The size of this ringlike region is determined by the ratio of the global monopole mass to the Planck mass and its appearance stems from the fact that the metric of the global monopole is not asymptotically flat but rather displays the characteristic spherical angle defect. The situation is therefore very much reminiscent of scattering in the gravitational field of the cosmic string.
Einstein’s gravitational field equations and the bianchi identities
2002
In his highly acclaimed biography of Einstein, Abraham Pais gave a fairly detailed analysis of the many difficulties his hero had to overcome in November 1915 before he finally arrived at generally covariant equations for gravitation (Pais 1982, 250–261).