![]() ![]() New data in the months since that discovery have made life increasingly difficult for the proponents of many of the modified-gravity theories that remain. ![]() The neutron-star collision was just the beginning. ![]() “That conference was like a funeral where we were breaking the news to some attendees.” Many researchers knew that the merger would be a big deal, but a lot of them simply “hadn’t understood their theories were on the brink of demise,” he later wrote in an email. Alternative theories of gravity attempt to eliminate the need for these phantasms by modifying the force of gravity in such a way that it properly describes all known observations - no dark stuff required.Īt the meeting, Zumalacárregui joked to his audience about the perils of combining science and Twitter, and then explained what the consequences would be if the rumors were true. Observations going back decades have shown that the universe appears to be filled with unseen particles - dark matter - as well as an anti-gravitational force called dark energy. These theories attempt to overcome what many researchers consider to be two enormous problems with our understanding of the universe. Zumalacárregui, a theoretical physicist at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, had been studying how the discovery of a neutron-star collision would affect so-called “alternative” theories of gravity. The official news had not yet broken about an epochal astronomical measurement - the detection, by gravitational wave detectors as well as many other telescopes, of a collision between two neutron stars - but a controversial tweet had lit a firestorm of rumor in the astronomical community, and excited researchers were discussing the discovery in hushed tones. In September 2017, he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Saclay, near Paris, to speak at a meeting about dark energy and modified gravity. Miguel Zumalacárregui knows what it feels like when theories die. Credit: Eric Nyquist for Quanta Magazine. Two white dwarfs and a pulsar orbit one another in a system that reveals how gravity behaves in extreme environments. ![]()
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