Wessel Valkenburg, Valerio Marra, Chris Clarkson
We present a new program for placing constraints on radial inhomogeneity in a dark-energy dominated universe. For the first time, we quantify restrictions on violations of the Copernican principle without neglecting dark energy. This is important because any violation of this principle would interfere with our interpretation of any dark-energy evolution. In particular, we find that current observations place reasonably tight constraints on possible late-time violations of the Copernican principle: the Figure of Merit in the parameter space of amplitude and scale of a spherical inhomogeneity around the observer has to be increased by a factor of 3 so as to confirm the Copernican principle. Then, by marginalising over possible radial inhomogeneity we provide the first constraints on the cosmological constant which are free of the homogeneity prior prevalent in cosmological modelling.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.4078
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