Average luminosity distance in inhomogeneous universes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inhomogeneities modeled as voids affect the average luminosity distance in the universe, finding that such effects are largely canceled out by averaging over all directions, thus unlikely to mimic dark energy.

Contribution

It provides a non-perturbative analysis of inhomogeneity effects on luminosity distance averaging, demonstrating significant cancellations and setting bounds on their impact.

Findings

Average correction is about 20% of maximal velocity correction.

Cancellations between void fronts and backs reduce the net effect.

Voids cannot mimic dark energy unless much larger or faster.

Abstract

The paper studies the correction to the distance modulus induced by inhomogeneities and averaged over all directions from a given observer. The inhomogeneities are modeled as mass-compensated voids in random or regular lattices within Swiss-cheese universes. Void radii below 300 Mpc are considered, which are supported by current redshift surveys and limited by the recently observed imprint such voids leave on CMB. The averaging over all directions, performed by numerical ray tracing, is non-perturbative and includes the supernovas inside the voids. Voids aligning along a certain direction produce a cumulative gravitational lensing correction that increases with their number. Such corrections are destroyed by the averaging over all directions, even in non-randomized simple cubic void lattices. At low redshifts, the average correction is not zero but decays with the peculiar velocities and redshift. Its upper bound is provided by the maximal average correction which assumes no random cancelations between different voids. It is described well by a linear perturbation formula and, for the voids considered, is 20% of the correction corresponding to the maximal peculiar velocity. The average correction calculated in random and simple cubic void lattices is severely damped below the predicted maximal one after a single void diameter. That is traced to cancellations between the corrections from the fronts and backs of different voids. All that implies that voids cannot imitate the effect of dark energy unless they have radii and peculiar velocities much larger than the currently observed. The results obtained allow one to readily predict the redshift above which the direction-averaged fluctuation in the Hubble diagram falls below a required precision and suggest a method to extract the background Hubble constant from low redshift data without the need to correct for peculiar velocities.