* Astronomy

Australia Telescope National Facility / Anglo Australian Observatory Joint Colloquium

Thursday 21 April 2011
15:30 to 16:30
ATNF Marsfield Lecture Theatre

Probing gravity with galaxy surveys

Modifications of gravity are studied with growing interest in cosmology. A strong motivation comes from the puzzling existence of dark energy; since the existence of DE is only inferred from the Friedmann equation, it may be that DE does not exist, but that a different equation should apply. A way to tell is to look for evidence of non-standard gravity on smaller scales, via the growth of large-scale structure. This can be measured via redshift-space distortions of clustering, and this talk shows new measurements using 160,000 redshifts from the GAMA survey. At the 10% level, the results from 6 different galaxy subsets are all consistent with the standard LCDM model. Future projects offering improved accuracy will be reviewed.
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