Cosmic distance-duality as a probe of exotic physics and acceleration

By Bruce A. Bassett, Martin Kunz. 2003

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In cosmology, distances based on standard candles (e.g. supernovae) and standard rulers (e.g. baryon oscillations) agree as long as three conditions are met: (1) photon number is conserved, (2) gravity is described by a metric theory with (3) photons travelling on unique null geodesics. This is the content of distance-duality (the reciprocity relation) which can be violated by exotic physics. Here we analyse the implications of the latest cosmological data sets for distance-duality. While broadly in agreement and confirming acceleration we find a 2-sigma violation caused by excess brightening of SN-Ia at z > 0.5, perhaps due to lensing magnification bias. This brightening has been interpreted as evidence for a late-time transition in the dark energy but because it is not seen in the d_A data we argue against such an interpretation. Our results do, however, rule out significant SN-Ia evolution and extinction: the "replenishing" grey-dust model with no cosmic acceleration is excluded at more than 4-sigma despite this being the best-fit to SN-Ia data alone, thereby illustrating the power of distance-duality even with current data sets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e9a4456d78c795f148451855965817cc4a62ec1

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “While the latter scenario has been ruled out by observations [20, 141], it has been shown [343] that the effect of grey dust could cause an extinction as large as 0.”