39 research outputs found
Confirmation of general relativity on large scales from weak lensing and galaxy velocities
Although general relativity underlies modern cosmology, its applicability on
cosmological length scales has yet to be stringently tested. Such a test has
recently been proposed, using a quantity, EG, that combines measures of
large-scale gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering and structure growth rate.
The combination is insensitive to 'galaxy bias' (the difference between the
clustering of visible galaxies and invisible dark matter) and is thus robust to
the uncertainty in this parameter. Modified theories of gravity generally
predict values of EG different from the general relativistic prediction
because, in these theories, the 'gravitational slip' (the difference between
the two potentials that describe perturbations in the gravitational metric) is
non-zero, which leads to changes in the growth of structure and the strength of
the gravitational lensing effect3. Here we report that EG = 0.39 +/- 0.06 on
length scales of tens of megaparsecs, in agreement with the general
relativistic prediction of EG 0.4. The measured value excludes a
model within the tensor-vector-scalar gravity theory, which modifies both
Newtonian and Einstein gravity. However, the relatively large uncertainty still
permits models within f(R) theory, which is an extension of general relativity.
A fivefold decrease in uncertainty is needed to rule out these models.Comment: Submitted version; 13 pages, 2 figures. Accepted version and
supplementary material are available at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/nature08857.html
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Fast and slow responses of Southern Ocean sea surface temperature to SAM in coupled climate models
We investigate how sea surface temperatures (SSTs) around Antarctica respond to the Southern An- nular Mode (SAM) on multiple timescales. To that end we examine the relationship between SAM and SST within unperturbed preindustrial control simulations of coupled general circulation models (GCMs) included in the Climate Modeling Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5). We develop a technique to extract the re- sponse of the Southern Ocean SST (55◦S−70◦S) to a hypothetical step increase in the SAM index. We demonstrate that in many GCMs, the expected SST step re- sponse function is nonmonotonic in time. Following a shift to a positive SAM anomaly, an initial cooling regime can transition into surface warming around Antarctica. However, there are large differences across the CMIP5 ensemble. In some models the step response function never changes sign and cooling persists, while in other GCMs the SST anomaly crosses over from negative to positive values only three years after a step increase in the SAM. This intermodel diversity can be related to differences in the models’ climatological thermal ocean stratification in the region of seasonal sea ice around Antarctica. Exploiting this relationship, we use obser- vational data for the time-mean meridional and vertical temperature gradients to constrain the real Southern Ocean response to SAM on fast and slow timescales