Testing non-local gravity by clusters of galaxies

Abstract

Extended theories of gravity have been extensively investigated during the last thirty years, aiming at fixing infrared and ultraviolet shortcomings of General Relativity and of the associated varLambda CDM cosmological model. Recently, non-local theories of gravity have drawn increasing attention due to their potential to ameliorate both the ultraviolet and infrared behavior of gravitational interaction. In particular, Integral Kernel theories of Gravity provide a viable mechanism to explain the late time cosmic acceleration so as to avoid the introduction of any form of unknown dark energy. On the other hand, these models represent a natural link towards quantum gravity. Here, we study a scalar-tensor equivalent model of General Relativity corrected with non-local terms, where corrections are selected by the existence of Noether symmetries. After performing the weak field limit and generalizing the results to extended mass distributions, we analyse the non-local model at galaxy cluster scales, by comparing the theoretical predictions with gravitational lensing observations from the CLASH program. We obtain agreement with data at the same level of statistical significance as General Relativity. We also provide constraints for the Navarro–Frenk–White parameters and lower bounds for the non-local length scales. The results are finally compared with those from the literature.