English

How does an incomplete sky coverage affect the Hubble Constant variance?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-09-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We address the 4.4σ\simeq 4.4\sigma tension between local and the CMB measurements of the Hubble Constant using simulated Type Ia Supernova (SN) data-sets. We probe its directional dependence by means of a hemispherical comparison through the entire celestial sphere as an estimator of the H0H_0 cosmic variance. We perform Monte Carlo simulations assuming isotropic and non-uniform distributions of data points, the latter coinciding with the real data. This allows us to incorporate observational features, such as the sample incompleteness, in our estimation. We obtain that this tension can be alleviated to 3.4σ3.4\sigma for isotropic realizations, and 2.7σ2.7\sigma for non-uniform ones. We also find that the H0H_0 variance is largely reduced if the data-sets are augmented to 4 and 10 times the current size. Future surveys will be able to tell whether the Hubble Constant tension happens due to unaccounted cosmic variance, or whether it is an actual indication of physics beyond the standard cosmological model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.04966,
  title  = {How does an incomplete sky coverage affect the Hubble Constant variance?},
  author = {Carlos A. P. Bengaly and Uendert Andrade and Jailson S. Alcaniz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04966},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. References updated, main results unchanged. Accepted in EPJC

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:36:08.066Z