IA/U.Lisboa Seminar - Testing fundamental physics with astronomical observations - 14 maio 2018

Cosmologists have increasing interest in testing different gravitational theories in more and more accurate ways. Large effort is devoted to boost the precision of the meassurements of very well know observables such as correlation functions, redshift space distorsions, etc. While performing such experiments is indispensable, it is important to keep in mind that they may not be enough to rule out General Relativity, especially if standard and modified gravity theories are degenerated in this small set of observables. The only way in which we we can keep our hopes for detecting departures from GR is to study new alternative observables. I will discuss two examples: one in the context of galaxy surveys and the other in the much smaller scales associated to globular clusters. I will finish the talk by describing an alternative method for running the very large cosmological simulations that are required to develope this kind of tests.