Related papers: Cosmological Observations: Averaging on the Null C…
Using numerical ray tracing, the paper studies how the average distance modulus in an inhomogeneous universe differs from its homogeneous counterpart. The averaging is over all directions from a fixed observer not over all possible…
The backreaction of structure formation influences the cosmological evolution equation for the homogenous and isotropic average metric. In a cold dark matter universe this effect leads only to small corrections unless a substantial fraction…
Supernovae observations strongly support the presence of a cosmological constant, but its value, which we will call apparent, is normally determined assuming that the Universe can be accurately described by a homogeneous model. Even in the…
Recent galaxy redshift surveys have brought in a large amount of accurate cosmological data out to redshift 0.3, and future surveys are expected to achieve a high degree of completeness out to a redshift exceeding 1. Consequently, a…
We consider the form of Hubble diagrams that would be constructed by observers in universes that are homogeneous but anisotropic, when averaged over suitably large length-scales. This is achieved by ray-tracing in different directions on…
Current cosmological observations, when interpreted within the framework of a homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model, strongly suggest that the Universe is entering a period of accelerating expansion.…
Structure occurs over a vast range of scales in the universe. Our large-scale cosmological models are coarse-grained representations of what exists, which have much less structure than there really is. An important problem for cosmology is…
These lecture notes review the theoretical problems associated with coarse-graining the observed inhomogeneous structure of the universe at late epochs, of describing average cosmic evolution in the presence of growing inhomogeneity, and of…
Quantum cosmology is traditionally formulated in a minisuperspace setting, implicitly averaging fields over space to obtain homogeneous models. For universal reasons related to the uncertainty principle, quantum corrections then depend on…
We discuss the construction of cosmological models within the framework of Macroscopic Gravity (MG), which is a theory that models the effects of averaging the geometry of space-time on large scales. We find new exact spatially homogeneous…
From the standpoint of theoretical physics we can treat Newtonian cosmology as a problem in nonlinear dynamics. The attempt to average the density, in search of a method of making contact between theory and observation, is replaced by the…
Cosmological observables are used to construct cosmological models. Since cosmological observations are limited to the light cone, a fixed number of observables (even measured to arbitrary accuracy) may not uniquely determine a cosmological…
Astronomical observations reveal hierarchical structures in the Universe, from galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters and superclusters, to filaments and voids. On the largest scales it seems that some kind of statistical homogeneity can be…
The symmetry axes of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are randomly distributed in space but highly inclined sources are heavily obscured and are not seen as quasars with broad emission lines. The obscuring torus geometry determines the average…
We lay out a general framework for calculating the variation of a set of cosmological observables, down the past null cone of an arbitrarily placed observer, in a given arbitrary inhomogeneous metric. The observables include redshift,…
In the timescape scenario cosmic acceleration is understand as an apparent effect, due to gravitational energy gradients that grow when spatial curvature gradients become significant with the nonlinear growth of cosmic structure. This…
We study the effects of inhomogeneities on the evolution of the Universe, by considering a range of cosmological models with discretized matter content. This is done using exact and fully relativistic methods that exploit the symmetries in…
The strong equivalence principle is extended in application to averaged dynamical fields in cosmology to include the role of the average density in the determination of inertial frames. The resulting cosmological equivalence principle is…
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…
A wide range of large scale observations hint towards possible modifications on the standard cosmological model which is based on a homogeneous and isotropic universe with a small cosmological constant and matter. These observations, also…