Angular distribution of cosmological parameters as a probe of inhomogeneities: a kinematic parametrisation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the angular distribution of cosmological parameters using a kinematic approach to test for inhomogeneities in the universe's expansion, finding backreaction effects are too small to detect with current methods.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent kinematic parametrisation to analyze large-scale inhomogeneities and quantifies backreaction effects on cosmological parameters.

Findings

Backreaction effects on q_0 are below detection thresholds.

Backreaction effects on j_0 are about ten times larger than on q_0 but still undetectable.

The method confirms the negligible impact of inhomogeneities on observable cosmological parameters.

Abstract

We use a kinematic parametrisation of the luminosity distance to measure the angular distribution on the sky of time derivatives of the scale factor, in particular the Hubble parameter H_0, the deceleration parameter q_0, and the jerk parameter j_0. We apply a recently published method to complement probing the inhomogeneity of the large-scale structure by means of the inhomogeneity in the cosmic expansion. This parametrisation is independent of the cosmological equation of state, which renders it adequate to test interpretations of the cosmic acceleration alternative to the cosmological constant. For the same analytical toy model of an inhomogeneous ensemble of homogenous pixels, we derive the backreaction term in j_0 due to the fluctuations of {H_0,q_0} and measure it to be of order 10^{-2} times the corresponding average over the pixels in the absence of backreaction. In agreement with that computed using a Lambda CDM parametrisation of the luminosity distance, the backreaction effect on q_0 remains below the detection threshold. Although the backreaction effect on j_0 is about ten times that on q_0, it is also below the detection threshold. Hence backreaction remains unobservable both in q_0 and in j_0.