Speaker
Description
The first version of the massive theory of gravity was introduced by Fierz and Pauli in 1939. In 1972 Boulware and Deser found ghosts in massive theories of gravity and physicists concluded that such theories hardly ever could be realizable in nature. Several years ago C. de Rham and her co-authors showed that there is an opportunity to create massive theories of gravity without ghosts (see, [1] for reference). In the first LIGO-- Virgo paper where the authors reported about the discovery of gravitational waves and discovery of binary black hole systems it was also reported about graviton mass constraint. Soon after that we showed that similar constraints could be obtained from observations of bright stars near the Galactic Center done by VLT -- GRAVITY collaboration and Keck group observing the Galactic Center (leaders of these groups R. Genzel and A. Ghez were awarded by Nobel prize in 2020). Our constraint on graviton mass was included in PDG https://pdg.lbl.gov/2025/listings/rpp2025-list-graviton.pdf and in the fundamental book on the subject [1]. One can find references at our 8 papers on the subject in a recent GRAVITY paper [2].
We discuss other ways to constrain graviton mass from other astronomical observations.
[1]. C. de Rham, A. Tolley, The Encyclopedia of Cosmology, Set 2: Frontiers in Cosmology, Volume 1. Modified Gravity, Editor-in-chief: Giovanni G Fazio, World Scientific, Singapore (2024).
[2]. [9]. GRAVITY Collaboration, Astron. Astrophys. 698, L15 (2025) https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/06/aa54676-25/aa54676-25.html
