The kinematic component of the cosmological redshift

Abstract

It is widely believed that the cosmological redshift is not a Doppler shift. However, Bunn & Hogg have recently pointed out that to settle properly this problem, one has to transport parallelly the velocity four-vector of a distant galaxy to the observer's position. Performing such a transport along the null geodesic of photons arriving from the galaxy, they found that the cosmological redshift is purely kinematic. Here we argue that one should rather transport the velocity four-vector along the geodesic connecting the points of intersection of the world-lines of the galaxy and the observer with the hypersurface of constant cosmic time. We find that the resulting relation between the transported velocity and the redshift of arriving photons is not given by a relativistic Doppler formula. Instead, for small redshifts it coincides with the well known non-relativistic decomposition of the redshift into a Doppler (kinematic) component and a gravitational one. We perform such a decomposition for arbitrary large redshifts and derive a formula for the kinematic component of the cosmological redshift, valid for any FLRW cosmology. In particular, in a universe with Omega_m = 0.24 and Omega_Lambda = 0.76, a quasar at a redshift 6, at the time of emission of photons reaching us today had the recession velocity v = 0.997c. This can be contrasted with v = 0.96c, had the redshift been entirely kinematic. Thus, for recession velocities of such high-redshift sources, the effect of deceleration of the early Universe clearly prevails over the effect of its relatively recent acceleration. Last but not least, we show that the so-called proper recession velocities of galaxies, commonly used in cosmology, are in fact radial components of the galaxies' four-velocity vectors. As such, they can indeed attain superluminal values, but should not be regarded as real velocities.

10 pages, 1 figure; matches the version published in MNRAS

References in corpus (10)

• The kinematic origin of the cosmological redshift
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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Astronomical Redshifts and the Expansion of Space
• Flow and peculiar velocities for generic motion in spherically symmetric black holes
• A physical interpretation of Hubble's law and the cosmological redshift from the perspective of a static observer
• Tantalizing New Physics from the Cosmic Purview
• Teaching cosmology with special relativity: Piecewise inertial frames as a model for cosmic expansion
• Velocities of distant objects in General Relativity revisited
• Accounting for gauge symmetries in CHSH experiments