Light bending and gravitational lensing in Brans-Dicke theory

As an important candidate theory of gravity, Brans-Dicke theory has been widely studied. In this paper, we investigate light bending and gravitational lensing by compact objects in Brans-Dicke theory in weak gravitational field. Firstly, we present a general formalism for calculating higher-order corrections to light bending angle and lensing observables for a static, spherically symmetric and flat spacetime, in which the metric is given in the isotropic coordinates. Secondly, we apply the general formalism to Brans-Dicke theory and get the corresponding light bending angle and lensing observables. Our results show that, although the sums over the low-order correction terms in magnifications of the primary and secondary images do not dependent on the theories of gravity, the sums over correction terms with order higher than three do. Moreover, we show that the total magnification has a non-vanishing first-order correction, rather than a vanishing contribution concluded in the literature. We find that the corrections to lensing observables of BD theory close to those of GR when the parameter omega tends to +infinity from -3/2, while opposition occurs when omega tends to -2 from -infinity. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.