Aspen Summer Cosmology Workshop: Testing General Relativity in the Cosmos (June 14 to July 5 2009)

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Rachel Bean
Posts: 3
Joined: August 21 2008
Affiliation: Cornell

Aspen Summer Cosmology Workshop: Testing General Relativity

Post by Rachel Bean » January 15 2009

Application info: http://www.aspenphys.org/documents/prog ... shops.html
Application deadline : January 31st 2009


General relativity is very well tested in the Solar System, in measurements of the orbital decay of the binary pulsar, and in the early universe, via primordial nucleosynthesis. Understanding gravitation in the strong field limit, around black holes, neutron stars and supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is being actively pursued with LIGO, upcoming LISA pathfinder and planned LISA missions. None of these tests, however, probes the nature of gravity on galactic and cosmic scales, indeed constraints on gravity on extra solar system scales are surprisingly few and poor. Establishing ways to test gravity at these scales is now a major scientific goal as it is vital in order to understand the nature of two dark augmentations of the minimalist cosmological picture, of baryonic matter interacting gravitationally through general relativity.

The workshop's aim is to bring together theorists and experimentalists to discuss the spectrum of new theoretical approaches to understanding gravity's role in the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and the crucial issue of how precision experiments, at solar system, galactic, extra-galactic and cosmological scales, can be designed and best utilized to directly and indirectly measure the observable signatures of these theories.

Organizers:
Rachel Bean, Cornell University
Wayne Hu , University of Chicago
Bhuvnesh Jain, University of Pennsylvania

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