Abstract: We review the recent literature on modified theories of gravity in the Palatini approach. After discussing the motivations that lead to consider alternatives to Einstein's theory and to treat the metric and the connection as independent objects, we review several topics that have been recently studied within this framework. In particular, we provide an in-depth analysis of the cosmic speed-up problem, laboratory and solar system tests, the structure of stellar objects, the Cauchy problem, and bouncing cosmologies. We also discuss the importance of going beyond the f(R) models to capture other phenomenological aspects related with dark matter/energy and quantum gravity.

Abstract: We revisit the gauge symmetry related to integrable projective transformations in metric-affine formalism, identifying the gauge field of the Weyl (conformal) symmetry as a dynamical component of the affine connection. In particular, we show how to include the local scaling symmetry as a gauge symmetry of a large class of geometric gravity theories, introducing a compensator dilaton field that naturally gives rise to a Stuckelberg sector where a spontaneous breaking mechanism of the conformal symmetry is at work to generate a mass scale for the gauge field. For Ricci-based gravities that include, among others, General Relativity, f(R) and f(R, R μnu R μnu) theories and the EiBI model, we prove that the on-shell gauge vector associated to the scaling symmetry can be identified with the torsion vector, thus recovering and generalizing conformal invariant theories in the Riemann-Cartan formalism, already present in the literature.

Abstract: The optical appearance of a body compact enough to feature an unstable bound orbit, when surrounded by an accretion disk, is expected to be dominated by a luminous ring of radiation enclosing a central brightness depression typically known as the shadow. Despite observational limitations, the rough details of this picture have been now confirmed by the results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration on the imaging of the M87 and Milky Way supermassive central objects. However, the precise characterization of both features-ring and shadow-depends on the interaction between the background geometry and the accretion disk, thus being a fertile playground to test our theories on the nature of compact objects and the gravitational field itself in the strong-field regime. In this work we use both features in order to test a continuous family of solutions interpolating between regular black holes and horizonless compact objects, which arise within the Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld theory of gravity, a viable extension of Einstein's general relativity (GR). To this end we consider seven distinctive classes of such configurations (five black holes and two traversable wormholes) and study their optical appearances under illumination by a geometrically and optically thin accretion disk, emitting monochromatically with three analytic intensity profiles previously suggested in the literature. We build such images and consider the sub-ring structure created by light rays crossing the disk more than once and existing on top of the main ring of radiation. We discuss in detail the modifications as compared to their GR counterparts, the Lyapunov exponents of unstable nearly-bound orbits, as well as the differences between black hole and traversable wormholes for the three intensity profiles. In addition we use the claim by the EHT Collaboration on the radius of the bright ring acting (under proper calibrations) as a proxy for the radius of the shadow itself to explore the parameter space of our solutions compatible with such a result.