Related papers: Testing backreaction effects with observations
We review observational tests for the homogeneity of the Universe on large scales. Redshift and peculiar velocity surveys, radio sources, the X-Ray Background, the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and the Cosmic Microwave Background are used to set…
The curvature of a spacetime, either in a topological sense, or averaged over super-horizon-sized patches, is often equated with the global curvature term that appears in Friedmann's equation. In general, however, the Universe is…
The effective evolution of an inhomogeneous universe model in any theory of gravitation may be described in terms of spatially averaged variables. In Einstein's theory, restricting attention to scalar variables, this evolution can be…
We study the volume averaging of inhomogeneous metrics within GR and discuss its shortcomings such as gauge dependence, singular behavior as a result of caustics, and causality violations. To remedy these shortcomings, we suggest some…
Kinematical and dynamical properties of a generic inhomogeneous cosmological model, spatially averaged with respect to free-falling (generalized fundamental) observers, are investigated for the matter model irrotational dust. Paraphrasing a…
In the macroscopic gravity approach to the averaging problem in cosmology, the Einstein field equations on cosmological scales are modified by appropriate gravitational correlation terms. We study the averaging problem within the class of…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the existence of homogeneous surfaces as the background arena for structure formation. Homogeneity underpins both general relativistic and modified gravity models and is central to the way in…
Extremely well! In the $\Lambda$CDM model, the spacetime metric, $g_{ab}$, of our universe is approximated by an FLRW metric, $g_{ab}^{(0)}$, to about 1 part in $10^4$ or better on both large and small scales, except in the immediate…
The present matter density of the Universe, while highly inhomogeneous on small scales, displays approximate homogeneity on large scales. We propose that whereas it is justified to use the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) line…
For a flat $\Lambda$CDM universe, the dipole of the luminosity distance can be utilized to measure the Hubble parameter. It is here shown that this is not the case in more general settings where curvature and cosmic backreaction is…
The apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe is forcing us to examine the foundational aspects of the standard model of cosmology -- in particular, the fact that dark energy is a direct consequence of the homogeneity assumption. We…
Modern cosmology relies on the assumption of large-scale isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe. However, locally the Universe is inhomogeneous and anisotropic. So, how can local measurements (at the 100 Mpc scale) be used to determine…
The current cosmological model ($\Lambda$CDM) with the underlying FLRW metric relies on the assumption of local isotropy, hence homogeneity of the Universe. Difficulties arise when one attempts to justify this model as an average…
Current and upcoming surveys will measure the cosmological parameters with an extremely high accuracy. The primary goal of these observations is to eliminate some of the currently viable cosmological models created to explain the late time…
The standard model of cosmology has provided a good phenomenological description of a wide range of observations both at astrophysical and cosmological scales for several decades. This concordance model is constructed by a universal…
A new method is proposed for modelling spherically symmetric inhomogeneities in the Universe. The inhomogeneities have finite size and are compensated, so they do not exert any measurable gravitational force beyond their boundary. The…
There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether the effects of averaging out inhomogeneities (``backreaction'') in Cosmology can be large enough to account for the acceleration of the scale factor in the FLRW models. In…
A phenomenological formalism is presented in which the apparent acceleration of the universe is generated by large-scale structure formation, thus eliminating the coincidence and magnitude fine-tuning problems of the Cosmological Constant…
This article looks at how inhomogeneous spacetime models may be significant for cosmology. First it looks at how the averaging process may affect large scale dynamics, with backreaction effects leading to effective contributions to the…
There is an ongoing debate in the literature concerning the effects of averaging out inhomogeneities (``backreaction'') in cosmology. In particular, some simple models of structure formation studied in the literature seem to indicate that…