A New Application of the Lunar Laser Retroreflectors: Searching for the "Local" Hubble Expansion

Abstract

Precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance by the lunar laser ranging (LLR), which begun in the early 1970's, contributed significantly to geodesy, geophysics, and lunar planetology, as well as enabled astrophysicists to perform several fine tests of the relativistic gravitational field theory (General Relativity). Yet another promising application of LLR arises just now in the context of recent cosmological models, whose dynamics is substantially affected by some kinds of the dark matter (or the so-called "dark energy") uniformly distributed in space, and therefore should be accompanied by some residual Hubble expansion at any spatial scales, particularly, in the Earth-Moon system. The "local" Hubble expansion can be revealed by comparing the rate of increase in the lunar semi-major axis measured by LLR (which should be produced both by the well-known tidal exchange of angular momentum between the Earth and Moon and the local Hubble expansion) with the same quantity derived indirectly from astrometric data on the Earth's rotation deceleration (which is produced only by the tidal interaction). Such analysis really points to the discrepancy 1.3 cm/yr, which corresponds to the local Hubble constant H_0^(loc) = 33 +/- 5 (km/s)/Mpc. This value is about two times less than at intergalactic scales but many orders of magnitude greater than was predicted in earlier theoretical works.