Stability of a black hole and the speed of gravity waves within self-tuning cosmological models

Understand

The gravitational wave event GW170817 together with its electromagnetic counterparts constrains the speed of gravity to be extremely close to that of light.

• We first show, on the example of an exact Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution of a specific beyond-Horndeski theory, that imposing the strict equality of these speeds in the asymptotic homogeneous Universe suffices to guarantee so even in the vicinity of the black hole, where large curvature and scalar-field gradients are present.
• We also find that the solution is stable in a range of the model parameters.
• We finally show that an infinite class of beyond-Horndeski models satisfying the equality of gravity and light speeds still provide an elegant self-tuning: The very large bare cosmological constant entering the Lagrangian is almost perfectly counterbalanced by the energy-momentum tensor of the scalar field, yielding a tiny observable effective cosmological constant.