Self-accelerating Massive Gravity: Exact solutions for any isotropic matter distribution

TL;DR

This paper derives an exact solution in massive gravity showing how the graviton's degrees of freedom can produce a self-accelerating cosmological expansion without dark energy, applicable to any spherically symmetric matter distribution.

Contribution

It provides the first exact solution demonstrating self-acceleration in massive gravity for arbitrary isotropic matter distributions, highlighting the role of graviton degrees of freedom.

Findings

Massive gravity can produce a cosmological constant-like effect.

The solution is stable against large matter perturbations.

Self-acceleration occurs without dark energy ingredients.

Abstract

We present an exact solution to the equations of massive gravity that displays cosmological constant-like behavior for any spherically symmetric distribution of matter, including arbitrary time dependence. On this solution, the new degrees of freedom from the massive graviton generate a cosmological constant-like contribution to stress-energy that does not interact directly with other matter sources. When the effective cosmological constant contribution dominates over other sources of stress energy the cosmological expansion self-accelerates, even when no other dark-energy-like ingredients are present. The new degrees of freedom introduced by giving the graviton the mass do not respond to arbitrarily large radial or homogeneous perturbations from other matter fields on this solution. We comment on possible implications of this result.