Implications of the Neutron Star Merger GW170817 for Cosmological Scalar-Tensor Theories

The LIGO and VIRGO Collaborations have recently announced the detection of gravitational waves from a neutron star–neutron star merger (GW170817) and the simultaneous measurement of an optical counterpart (the $\gamma$-ray burst GRB 170817A). The close arrival time of the gravitational and electromagnetic waves limits the difference in speed of photons and gravitons to be less than about 1 part in $10^{15}$. This has three important implications for cosmological scalar-tensor gravity theories that are often touted as dark energy candidates and alternatives to the $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ cold dark matter model. First, for the most general scalar-tensor theories—beyond Horndeski models—three of the five parameters appearing in the effective theory of dark energy can now be severely constrained on astrophysical scales; we present the results of combining the new gravity wave results with galaxy cluster observations. Second, the combination with the lack of strong equivalence principle violations exhibited by the supermassive black hole in M87 constrains the quartic galileon model to be cosmologically irrelevant. Finally, we derive a new bound on the disformal coupling to photons that implies that such couplings are irrelevant for the cosmic evolution of the field.

Figure 1

The excluded regions in the ${\alpha }_H-{\alpha }_B$ plane now that $c_T$ is known to be unity with very high precision. The regions excluded by cluster tests and dwarf stars are labeled accordingly.

Figure 2

Constraints in the $c_4\text{−}{\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\varphi }$ plane coming from the near equivalence of the speed of gravitons and photons (orange) and the lack of an offset supermassive black hole in M87 (red). The shaded regions correspond to $c_0=1$, and we indicate the extent of the graviton speed constraint using the solid orange line. Also shown using the dashed and dotted lines are the equivalent regions for $c_0=3$ from the LIGO-Fermi and SMBH bounds respectively.