English

To H0 or not to H0?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2021-06-30 v3

Abstract

This paper investigates whether changes to late time physics can resolve the `Hubble tension'. It is argued that many of the claims in the literature favouring such solutions are caused by a misunderstanding of how distance ladder measurements actually work and, in particular, by the inappropriate use of a distance ladder H0 prior. A dynamics-free inverse distance ladder shows that changes to late time physics are strongly constrained observationally and cannot resolve the discrepancy between the SH0ES data and the base LCDM cosmology inferred from Planck. We propose a statistically rigorous scheme to replace the use of H0 priors

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.08723,
  title  = {To H0 or not to H0?},
  author = {George Efstathiou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.08723},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Expanded version following comments received on earlier astro-ph version

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:12:25.982Z