Cosmological implications of baryon acoustic oscillation measurements

By E. Aubourg, Stephen Bailey, Julián Bautista, F. Beutler, V. Bhardwaj, D. Bizyaev, M. Blanton, M. Blomqvist, A. Bolton, Jo Bovy and 85 more. 2014

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We derive constraints on cosmological parameters and tests of dark energy models from the combination of baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and a recent reanalysis of Type Ia supernova (SN) data. In particular, we take advantage of high-precision BAO measurements from galaxy clustering and the Lyman-alpha forest (LyaF) in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Treating the BAO scale as an uncalibrated standard ruler, BAO data alone yield a high confidence detection of dark energy; in combination with the CMB angular acoustic scale they further imply a nearly flat universe. Adding the CMB-calibrated physical scale of the sound horizon, the combination of BAO and SN data into an "inverse distance ladder" yields a measurement of H-0 = 67.3 +/- 1.1 km s(-1) Mpc(-1), with 1.7% precision. This measurement assumes standard prerecombination physics but is insensitive to assumptions about dark energy or space curvature, so agreement with CMB-based estimates that assume a flat Lambda CDM cosmology is an important corroboration of this minimal cosmological model. For constant dark energy (Lambda), our BAO + SN + CMB combination yields matter density Omega(m) = 0.301 +/- 0.008 and curvature Omega(k) = -0.003 +/- 0.003. When we allow more general forms of evolving dark energy, the BAO + SN + CMB parameter constraints are always consistent with flat Lambda CDM values at approximate to 1 sigma. While the overall chi(2) of model fits is satisfactory, the LyaF BAO measurements are in moderate (2-2.5 sigma) tension with model predictions. Models with early dark energy that tracks the dominant energy component at high redshift remain consistent with our expansion history constraints, and they yield a higher H-0 and lower matter clustering amplitude, improving agreement with some low redshift observations. Expansion history alone yields an upper limit on the summed mass of neutrino species, Sigma m(nu) < 0.56 eV (95% confidence), improving to Sigma m(nu) < 0.25 eV if we include the lensing signal in the Planck CMB power spectrum. In a flat Lambda CDM model that allows extra relativistic species, our data combination yields N-eff = 3.43 +/- 0.26; while the LyaF BAO data prefer higher N-eff when excluding galaxy BAO, the galaxy BAO alone favor N-eff approximate to 3. When structure growth is extrapolated forward from the CMB to low redshift, standard dark energy models constrained by our data predict a level of matter clustering that is high compared to most, but not all, observational estimates.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e5fd4aab999b598382cbfe61f6ab801142dd23b

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Citations in the corpus

THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, methodology): “Highlighting the complementarity between BAO and SNe Ia, Aubourg et al. (2015) explore models with the combination of SNe Ia and BAO calibrated by the sound horizon scale as measured by Planck.”
The Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Lyα Forests (2020, methodology): “…position yields both distances and expansion rates normalized to the sound horizon, rd. Constraints on cosmological parameters from BAOs (e.g., Aubourg et al. 2015) are consistent with those from SNeIa (Scolnic et al. 2018; Jones et al. 2019) and with indirect probes of acceleration like the…”
Planck2015 results (2015, unknown): “In fact, in a recent paper Aubourg et al. (2015) use the 2013 Planck constraints on rs in combination with BAO and the JLA SNe data to find H0 = (67.3 ± 1.1) km s−1Mpc−1, in excellent agreement with the 2015 Planck value for base ΛCDM given in Eq.”
Possible signals of vacuum dynamics in the Universe (2017, methodology): “…MNRAS 000, 000–000 (Betoule et al. 2014), BAOs (Beutler et al. 2011; Kazin et al. 2014; Ross et al. 2015; Gil-Maŕın et al. 2017; Delubac et al. 2015; Aubourg et al. 2015), the values of the Hubble parameter extracted from cosmic chronometers at various redshifts, H(zi) (Zhang et al. 2014,…”
A Future Percent-level Measurement of the Hubble Expansion at Redshift 0.8 with Advanced LIGO (2019, background): “…a distance ladder (Feeney et al. 2019; Scolnic et al. 2018), or compare the GW-determined distance scale with one derived from the photon-baryon sound horizon (Cuesta et al. 2015; Aylor et al. 2019) in the early universe (Planck Collaboration et al. 2016) or at late times (Aubourg et al. 2015).”
Cosmological parameters from the BOSS galaxy power spectrum (2019, background): “It is worth noting that this choice of priors is equivalent to fixing a prior on the sound horizon at decoupling, since it can be approximated as [75],”
First Evidence of Running Cosmic Vacuum: Challenging the Concordance Model (2016, background): “The correlation coefficient among these 2 points are taken from Aubourg et al. (2015) (cf. Table II of that reference).”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, methodology): “The inverse distance ladder method uses distances measured from baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in this way (e.g. Aubourg et al. 2015; Cuesta et al. 2015; Macaulay et al. 2019).”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, unknown): “(27) This level of w-uncertainty is ∼2.5 times larger compared to the constraints when adding either of the BAO or SNe data sets to the Planck+WP measurements (Aubourg et al. 2015; Betoule et al. 2014).”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “scale structure [496, 497, 124, 498, 499] achieve a precision of a few percent, but the two types of measurement are in tension with each other at the 2σ − 4σ level (central values ranging from H0 = 67 km/s/Mpc to 73 km/s/Mpc).”