A conventional approach to the dark-energy concept

TL;DR

This paper explores a cosmological model where dark matter has thermodynamic properties, showing it can explain observations without dark energy, contrasting with traditional collisionless dark matter models.

Contribution

It introduces a collisional dark matter model that accounts for cosmic acceleration and fits observational data without requiring dark energy or a cosmological constant.

Findings

Collisional dark matter can explain supernova and baryon acoustic oscillation data.

The model fits the Hubble diagram accurately without dark energy.

Traditional collisionless models struggle to match observations without dark energy.

Abstract

Motivated by results implying that the constituents of dark matter (DM) might be collisional, we consider a cosmological (toy-) model, in which the DM itself possesses some sort of thermodynamic properties. In this case, not only can the matter content of the Universe be treated as a classical gravitating fluid of positive pressure, but, together with all its other physical characteristics, the energy of this fluid's internal motions should be taken into account as a source of the universal gravitational field. This form of energy can compensate for the extra (dark) energy, needed to compromise spatial flatness, while the post-recombination Universe remains ever-decelerating. At the same time (i.e., in the context of the collisional-DM approach), the theoretical curve representing the distance modulus as a function of the cosmological redshift, {\mu}(z), fits the Hubble diagram of a multi-used sample of supernova Ia events quite accurately. A cosmological model filled with collisional DM could accommodate the majority of the currently-available observational data (including, also, those from baryon acoustic oscillations), without the need for either any dark energy (DE) or the cosmological constant. However, as we demonstrate, this is not the case for someone who, although living in a Universe filled with self-interacting DM, insists on adopting the traditional, collisionless-DM approach. From the point of view of this observer, the cosmologically-distant light-emitting sources seem to lie farther (i.e., they appear to be dimmer) than expected, while the Universe appears to be either accelerating or decelerating, depending on the value of the cosmological redshift. This picture, which, nowadays, represents the common perception in observational cosmology, acquires a more conventional interpretation within the context of the collisional-DM approach.