Solar and stellar system tests of the cosmological constant
Abstract
Some tests of gravity theories - periastron shift, geodetic precession, change in mean motion and gravitational redshift - are applied in solar and stellar systems to constrain the cosmological constant. We thus consider a length scale range from 108 to 1015 km. Best bounds from the solar system come from perihelion advance and change in mean motion of Earth and Mars, Lambda < 10-36 km-2. Such a limit falls very short to estimates from observational cosmology analyses but a future experiment performing radio ranging observations of outer planets could improve it by four orders of magnitude. Beyond the solar system, together with future measurements of periastron advance in wide binary pulsars, gravitational redshift of white dwarfs can provide bounds competitive with Mars data.
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