Monday, January 16, 2012

1201.2790 (Miguel Zumalacarregui et al.)

Tension in the Void: Cosmic Rulers Strain Inhomogeneous Cosmologies    [PDF]

Miguel Zumalacarregui, Juan Garcia-Bellido, Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente
New constraints on inhomogeneous Lem\^aitre-Tolman-Bondi models alternative to Dark Energy are presented, focusing on profiles with homogeneous Big Bang and baryon fraction. The Baryon Acoustic Scale at early times is computed in terms of the asymptotic value and then projected to different redshifts by following the geodesics of the background metric. Additionally, a new model-independent method to constraint the local expansion rate in terms of the supernovae luminosity is introduced. Cosmologies described by an adiabatic GBH profile with $\Omega_{\rm out}=1$ and $\Omega_{\rm out}\leq 1$ are investigated using Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis including the latest Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) data from the WiggleZ collaboration and the local expansion rate from the Hubble Space Telescope, together with Union-II type Ia supernovae data and the position of the Cosmic Microwave Background peaks from WMAP. The addition of BAO data at higher redshifts increases considerably their constraining power and represents a new drawback for this type of models, yielding a value of the local density parameter $\Omega_{\rm in}\gtrsim 0.2$ which is 3$\sigma$ apart from the value $\Omega_{\rm in}\lesssim 0.15$ found using supernovae. Asymptotically flat models show an additional tension regarding the value of the Hubble rate and the present age of the universe. Although the $\chi^2$/d.o.f. for the GBH-LTB models is similar to that of a fiducial $\Lambda$CDM model, a Bayesian analysis shows that a constrained GBH model is ruled out at high confidence. The situation does not improve if the asymptotic flatness assumption is dropped for these models. (abridged)
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2790

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