Observational probes of cosmic acceleration

By D. Weinberg, M. Mortonson, Daniel J. Eisenstein, C. Hirata, A. Riess, E. Rozo. 2012

1,175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades, implying that the universe is dominated by some form of “dark energy” with exotic physical properties, or that Einstein’s theory of gravity breaks down on cosmological scales. The profound implications of cosmic acceleration have inspired ambitious efforts to understand its origin, with experiments that aim to measure the history of expansion and growth of structure with percent-level precision or higher. We review in detail the four most well established methods for making such measurements: Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), weak gravitational lensing, and the abundance of galaxy clusters. We pay particular attention to the systematic uncertainties in these techniques and to strategies for controlling them at the level needed to exploit “Stage IV” dark energy facilities such as BigBOSS, LSST, Euclid, and WFIRST. We briefly review a number of other approaches including redshift-space distortions, the Alcock–Paczynski effect, and direct measurements of the Hubble constant H_0. We present extensive forecasts for constraints on the dark energy equation of state and parameterized deviations from General Relativity, achievable with Stage III and Stage IV experimental programs that incorporate supernovae, BAO, weak lensing, and cosmic microwave background data. We also show the level of precision required for clusters or other methods to provide constraints competitive with those of these fiducial programs. We emphasize the value of a balanced program that employs several of the most powerful methods in combination, both to cross-check systematic uncertainties and to take advantage of complementary information. Surveys to probe cosmic acceleration produce data sets that support a wide range of scientific investigations, and they continue the longstanding astronomical tradition of mapping the universe in ever greater detail over ever larger scales.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/665f262e3db492a59a3c0b420db469e245be431d

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Citations in the corpus

LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, methodology): “Weak lensing (WL) techniques can be used to map the distribution of mass as a function of redshift and thereby trace the history of both the expansion of the Universe and the growth of structure (e.g., Hu & Tegmark 1999; for reviews see Bartelmann & Schneider 2001 and Weinberg et al. 2013).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space (2016, methodology): “Therefore, reconstructing w(z) directly from data is an efficient way for DE studies (Sahni & Starobinsky 2006; Zhao et al. 2012; Weinberg et al. 2013).”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, background): “A review of most well-established probes can be found in literature [99].”
THE COYOTE UNIVERSE EXTENDED: PRECISION EMULATION OF THE MATTER POWER SPECTRUM (2013, background): “For a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art (pre-Planck) we refer the reader to Weinberg et al. (2013).”
A 6% measurement of the Hubble parameter at z∼0.45: direct evidence of the epoch of cosmic re-acceleration (2016, background): “ the panorama of cosmological probes is therefore of extreme interest, in order to take advantage of the strength of each method and to keep systematics under control (for a detailed review, see ref. [6]). So far, the best measurements have been obtained with standard candles (SNe) [4, 5] and standa”
Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, methodology): “For this reason, they can be used in conjunction with optical observations to directly measure the Hubble constant, which cannot be obtained by SNIa observations, which are calibrated in the local Hubble flow [21].”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “, [426, 427]) because tSZ observables provide both low-scatter mass proxies and a detection method that is independent of cluster distance (since it is a spectral distortion of the CMB).”
Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, methodology): “Note that these values of α do not correspond simply to effective redshift and mass limits of the data set (e.g. Weinberg et al. 2013) because we perform this analysis after marginalizing over systematic uncertainties, which limit the constraints on both Ωm and σ8.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Measuring growth rate and geometry with anisotropic clustering (2013, background): “Galaxies map the distribution of the underlying dark matter field and provide invaluable information about both the nature of dark energy (DE) and properties of gravity (see e.g. Weinberg et al. 2013).”
Measuring Dark Energy Properties with Photometrically Classified Pan-STARRS Supernovae. II. Cosmological Parameters (2017, background): “Because SNe Ia are observed in the recent cosmic epochs when dark energy is most dominant, they have more leverage to measure dark energy than most other cosmological probes (Weinberg et al. 2013).”
The SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at Redshift of 0.72 with the DR14 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample (2017, background): “Even so, the low value of the cosmological constant constrained by these data has as yet no compelling theoretical explanation (see Weinberg et al. 2013 for a review).”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “…methodology presented and the results achieved, we lay out a roadmap for further improvements to ultimately enable a 1% precision measurement of the Hubble constant, which is a clear target both for resolving the Hubble tension and to serve as a prior on dark energy studies (Weinberg et al. 2013).”
Redshift-space distortions in Lagrangian perturbation theory (2020, methodology): “Being a probe of the velocity field, RSD contain extra cosmological information compared to the density field only, and they have been shown to be a useful probe of modified gravity models [5–9].”
Elucidating ΛCDM: Impact of Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Measurements on the Hubble Constant Discrepancy (2017, methodology): “We restrict our analysis to the BAO scale as it is the most robust observable from LSS surveys (e.g., Weinberg et al. 2013, and references therein), and do not consider redshift-space distortion constraints or information from the broadband correlation function.”
Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “Combining different probes could be crucial to set an observational program to test gravity from cosmology (Weinberg et al., 2013).”
HUBBLE PARAMETER MEASUREMENT CONSTRAINTS ON THE REDSHIFT OF THE DECELERATION–ACCELERATION TRANSITION, DYNAMICAL DARK ENERGY, AND SPACE CURVATURE (2016, background): “In addition, the binned H(z) 1 For reviews of this picture, as well as of the alternate modified gravity scenario, see Ratra & Vogeley (2008), Weinberg et al. (2013), Martin (2012), Joyce et al. (2016), and references therein.”