Constraining Gravitational and Cosmological Parameters with Astrophysical Data

Understand

We use astrophysical data to shed light on fundamental physics by constraining parametrized theoretical cosmological and gravitational models.

• Gravitational parameters are those constants that parametrize possible departures from Einstein's general theory of relativity.
• We develop a general framework to describe torsion in the spacetime around the Earth, and show that certain observables of the Gravity Probe B experiment can be computed in this framework.
• We also search for viable theories of gravity where the Ricci scalar R in the Lagrangian is replaced by an arbitrary function f(R).