Screening maps of the local Universe I -- Methodology

Understand

We introduce the LOCal Universe Screening Test Suite (LOCUSTS) project, an effort to create 'screening maps' in the nearby Universe to identify regions in our neighbourhood which are screened, i.e., regions where deviations from General Relativity (GR) are suppressed, in various modified gravity (MG) models.

• In these models, deviations from the GR force law are often stronger for smaller astrophysical objects, making them ideal test beds of gravity in the local Universe.
• However, the actual behaviour of the modified gravity force also depends on the environment of the objects, and to make accurate predictions one has to take the latter into account.
• This can be done approximately using luminous objects in the local Universe as tracers of the underlying dark matter field.