Usually the effects of isotropic inhomogeneities are not seriously taken into account in the determination of the cosmological parameters because of Copernican principle whose statement is that we do not live in the privileged domain in the universe. But Copernican principle has not been observationally confirmed yet in sufficient accuracy, and there is the possibility that there are non-negligible large-scale isotropic inhomogeneities in our universe. In this paper, we study the effects of the isotropic inhomogeneities on the determination of the cosmological parameters and show the probability that non-Copernican isotropic inhomogeneities mislead us into believing, for example, the phantom energy of the equation of state, $p=wρ$ with $w<-1$, even in case that $w=-1$ is the true value.
Usually, we assume that there is no inhomogeneity isotropic in terms of our location in our uni- verse. This assumption has not been observationally confirmed yet in sufficient accuracy, and we need to consider the possibility that there are non-negligible large-scale isotropic inhomogeneities in our universe. The existence of large-scale isotropic inhomogeneities affects the determination of the cosmological parameters. In particular, from only the distance-redshift relation, we can not dis- tinguish the inhomogeneous isotropic universe model from the homogeneous isotropic one, because of the…
Usually, we assume that there is no inhomogeneity isotropic in terms of our location in the universe. This assumption has not been observationally confirmed yet in sufficient accuracy and we need to consider a method to restrict isotropic inhomogeneities more strongly. If there are isotropic inhomogeneities in the universe, the gravitational wave background is induced by nonlinear interactions between isotropic inhomogeneities and anisotropic inhomogeneous density perturbations. In this paper, we calculate the power spectrum and the relative energy density of this gravitational wave background…
In this paper, we study the effects of polynomial $f(R)$ model on the stability of homogeneous energy density in self-gravitating spherical stellar object. For this purpose, we construct couple of evolution equations which relate the Weyl tensor with matter parameters. We explore different factors responsible for density inhomogeneities with non-dissipative dust, isotropic as well as anisotropic fluids and dissipative dust cloud. We find that shear, pressure, dissipative parameters and $f(R)$ terms affect the existence of inhomogeneous energy density.
We analyze two different algorithms for constructing weakly inhomogeneous models for the low-redshift Universe, in order to provide a tool for testing the geodesic dynamics, within the sphere of validity for the Universe acceleration. We first implement the so-called quasi-isotropic solution in the late Universe, when a pure dark energy equation of state for the cosmological perfect fluid is considered. We demonstrate, that a solution exists only if the physical scale of the inhomogeneities is larger then the Hubble scale of the microphysics, which implies that inhomogeneities could not be obs…
Constraints on models of the late time acceleration of the universe assume the cosmological principle of homogeneity and isotropy on large scales. However, small scale inhomogeneities can alter observational and dynamical relations, affecting the inferred cosmological parameters. For precision constraints on the properties of dark energy, it is important to assess the potential systematic effects arising from these inhomogeneities. In this study, we use the Type Ia supernova magnitude-redshift relation to constrain the inhomogeneities as described by the Dyer-Roeder distance relation and the e…
The interpretation of cosmological observations relies on a notion of an average Universe, which is usually considered as the homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model. However, inhomogeneities may statistically bias the observational averages with respect to FLRW, notably for distance measurements, due to a number of effects such as gravitational lensing and redshift perturbations. In this article, we review the main known theoretical results on average distance measures in cosmology, based on second-order perturbation theory, and we fill in some of their gaps…
The standard cosmological model assumes a homogeneous and isotropic universe as the background spacetime on large scales called the cosmological principle. However, some observations suggest the possibility of an inhomogeneous and anisotropic universe at large scales. In this paper, we investigate a model of the universe with random inhomogeneities and anisotropies on very large scales, motivated by the supercurvature dark energy model in Nan et al. [Phys. Rev. D 99, 103512 (2019)]. In this model, the authors introduced a scalar field with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ inhomogeneities on a scale sufficient…
Testing cosmological isotropy with gravitational waves and gamma-ray bursts
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；De La Salle University（德拉萨学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Chung-Ang University（中央大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）
We propose and implement a novel, robust, and non-parametric test of statistical isotropy of the expansion of the universe, and apply it to around one thousand type Ia supernovae from the Pantheon sample. We calculate the angular clustering of supernova magnitude residuals and compare it to the noise expected under the isotropic assumption. We also test for systematic effects and demonstrate that their effects are negligible or are already accounted for in our procedure. We express our constraints as an upper limit on the rms spatial variation in the Hubble parameter at late times. For the sky…
Recent papers have shown that a small systematic redshift shift ($Δz\sim 10^{-5}$) in measurements of type Ia supernovae can cause a significant bias ($\sim$1\%) in the recovery of cosmological parameters. Such a redshift shift could be caused, for example, by a gravitational redshift due to the density of our local environment. The sensitivity of supernova data to redshift shifts means supernovae make excellent probes of inhomogeneities. We therefore invert the analysis, and try to diagnose the nature of our local gravitational environment by fitting for $Δz$ as an extra free parameter alongs…
Due to cosmic variance we cannot learn any more about large-scale inhomogeneities from the primary cosmic microwave background (CMB) alone. More information on large scales is essential for resolving large angular scale anomalies in the CMB. Here we consider cross correlating the large-scale kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect and probes of large-scale structure, a technique known as kSZ tomography. The statistically anisotropic component of the cross correlation encodes the CMB dipole as seen by free electrons throughout the observable Universe, providing information about long wavelength…
We study the first year of the eBOSS quasar sample in the redshift range $0.9<z<2.2$ which includes 68,772 homogeneously selected quasars. We show that the main source of systematics in the evaluation of the correlation function arises from inhomogeneities in the quasar target selection, particularly related to the extinction and depth of the imaging data used for targeting. We propose a weighting scheme that mitigates these systematics. We measure the quasar correlation function and provide the most accurate measurement to date of the quasar bias in this redshift range, $b_Q = 2.45 \pm 0.05$ …
