The AGN Hubble Diagram and Its Implications for Cosmology

TL;DR

This study uses AGN luminosity distances to compare cosmological models, finding no evidence for a transition from decelerated to accelerated expansion and favoring the R_h=ct model over LCDM based on statistical criteria.

Contribution

It introduces a new AGN-based Hubble Diagram for testing cosmological models and provides comparative analysis favoring R_h=ct over LCDM.

Findings

AGN data does not support a transition from deceleration to acceleration.

Statistical criteria favor R_h=ct as closer to the true cosmology.

Neither model fully explains the observed data scatter.

Abstract

We use a recently proposed luminosity distance measure for relatively nearby active galactic nuclei (AGNs) to test the predicted expansion of the Universe in the R_h=ct and LCDM cosmologies. This comparative study is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not the Universe underwent a transition from decelerated to accelerated expansion, which is believed to have occurred---on the basis of Type Ia SN studies---within the redshift range (0 < z < 1.3) that will eventually be sampled by these objects. We find that the AGN Hubble Diagram constructed from currently available sources does not support the existence of such a transition. While the scatter in the AGN data is still too large for any firm conclusions to be drawn, the results reported here nonetheless somewhat strengthen similar results of comparative analyses using other types of source. We show that the Akaike, Kullback, and Bayes Information Criteria all consistently yield a likelihood of ~84-96% that R_h=ct is closer to the "true" cosmology than LCDM is, though neither model adequately accounts for the data, suggesting an unnaccounted-for source of scatter.