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Around the Sun, planetary motions and spacecraft signals agree with Einstein so closely that any extra pull would have to survive there as a tiny residue.<\/p>\n
From that precise record, physicist Slava Turyshev at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL<\/a>) showed that the hidden force could persist locally without leaving an obvious trace.<\/p>\n Rather than disappearing outright, the force shrinks into a weak remnant that current instruments can miss while familiar gravity still governs the solar system.<\/p>\n That limit leaves the solar system looking less like a rejection of the force than a place where only its weakest traces could remain, pushing the question toward whatever suppresses it.<\/p>\n Why density matters<\/p>\n Far from stars and planets, matter thins out, and theories that add a fifth force \u2013 an extra interaction \u2013 can produce larger effects.<\/p>\n In these ideas, the environment changes how the added field behaves, so the force can act more freely in emptier regions.<\/p>\n That hiding is called screening, and it lets the universe look odd at large scales while nearby planets keep following familiar paths.<\/p>\n Once screening enters the story, a null result in the solar system becomes part of the model, not the end of it.<\/p>\n Chameleon in sunlight<\/p>\n One route uses chameleon screening, where the added field changes with local density and grows harder to notice as matter piles up.<\/p>\n Near the Sun, that setup can squeeze the effect into a thin outer shell instead of spreading it across the system.<\/p>\n Turyshev calculates that this leftover signal could still affect light travel time and free-fall if instruments improve enough.<\/p>\n That makes chameleon-like models frustrating but testable, because they predict a weak residue rather than perfect silence.<\/p>\n Gravity hides itself<\/p>\n A second route, Vainshtein screening<\/a>, suppresses the extra force through the surrounding gravitational field itself.<\/p>\n Instead of changing the force directly, the local environment chokes off its effects until a large boundary called the Vainshtein radius is crossed.<\/p>\n One account places the Sun\u2019s Vainshtein radius near 400 light-years, or roughly 2.4 quadrillion miles (3.9 quadrillion kilometers), large enough to include nearby stars.<\/p>\n If that picture is right, near-term missions would struggle to see anything there, even if the extra physics exists.<\/p>\n Cosmic surveys guide<\/p>\n The best clues now come from Euclid<\/a>, a European space telescope studying large-scale cosmic structure.<\/p>\n On the ground, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI<\/a>) has built a 3D map from millions of galaxies and quasar spectra.<\/p>\n Those surveys watch gravity in sparse regions where a screened force should leak out more clearly than it does near the Sun.<\/p>\n Their role is not to settle the case nearby, but to narrow the local signals a solar-system mission should chase.<\/p>\n What counts locally<\/p>\n The team argues that local experiments help only if they target signals a screened model still allows.<\/p>\n One candidate is Shapiro delay, the slowing of light or radio signals as gravity bends spacetime around a massive body.<\/p>\n Turyshev estimates that a spacecraft signal passing near the Sun could probe departures from Einstein at about two to five parts per million.<\/p>\n That is precise by any normal standard, yet still far above what a heavily Vainshtein-screened force<\/a> would leave behind.<\/p>\n Other narrow windows<\/p>\n Another opening comes from the Einstein equivalence principle, the rule that gravity pulls different forms of matter the same way.<\/p>\n Atom interferometers in space, upgraded lunar laser ranging, and linked optical clocks could catch mismatches or oscillations that navigation misses.<\/p>\n Turyshev forecasts sensitivity near one part in 100 quadrillion for some free-fall tests and threefold to tenfold gains for clock searches.<\/p>\n Each option looks for a specific leftover signature, which is exactly what screened theories require before an experiment can really fail them.<\/p>\n Missions drive discovery<\/p>\n None of that will happen by accident, because Euclid and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument watch the distant universe, not the solar gravity<\/a> well.<\/p>\n A serious local search would need mission plans built around a falsifiable prediction, a clear signal model, and purpose-made instruments.<\/p>\n That is why the work favors a guardrail-and-discovery program: tighten limits, then escalate when one anomaly survives scrutiny.<\/p>\n Without that trigger, a costly flagship mission risks repeating the same answer in finer detail.<\/p>\n A harder standard<\/p>\n The argument also cuts against a common instinct in physics, which is to assume that more precision alone will solve a mismatch.<\/p>\n Here, precision matters only after theory tells researchers exactly where screening leaves a measurable residue.<\/p>\n That puts the burden on models that link cosmic observations to local leftovers instead of treating the two arenas separately.<\/p>\n If such a model survives, the solar system becomes a place to reject weak ideas and sharpen stronger ones.<\/p>\n What comes next<\/p>\n The work recasts a frustrating mismatch between cosmic behavior and local precision tests as a narrower problem of screened remnants and mission design.<\/p>\n That does not make a new force likely, but it shows how dark energy, dark matter, and solar-system physics might meet.<\/p>\n The study is published in Physical Review D<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read?\u00a0Subscribe to our newsletter\u00a0<\/a>for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on\u00a0EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by\u00a0Eric Ralls\u00a0<\/a>and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new analysis has revealed that a force tied to dark energy could still be hiding in 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