Virialization-induced curvature versus dark energy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how virialization and inhomogeneities in the universe can affect cosmological observations, proposing a relativistic correction to the FLRW metric that may reduce the need for dark energy in explaining data.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify the impact of inhomogeneities on cosmological parameters using a multi-scale approach and virialization data, offering an alternative perspective to dark energy.

Findings

Relativistic correction yields realistic distance moduli up to redshift 3.

Inhomogeneities significantly influence cosmological parameter estimation.

Potential to reduce reliance on dark energy in cosmological models.

Abstract

The concordance model is successful in explaining numerous observable phenomena at the price of introducing an exotic source of unknown origin: dark energy. Dark energy dominance occurs at recent epochs, when we expect most cosmological structures to have already formed, and thus, when the error induced by forcing the homogeneous FLRW metric onto the data is expected to be the most significant. We propose a way to quantify the impact of deviations from homogeneity on the evolution of cosmological parameters. Using a multi-scale partitioning approach and the virialization fraction estimated from numerical simulations in an Einstein-de Sitter model, we obtain an observationally realistic distance modulus over redshifts 0 < z < 3 by a relativistic correction of the FLRW metric.