Do primordial Lithium abundances imply there's no Dark Energy?

Abstract

Explaining the well established observation that the expansion rate of the universe is apparently accelerating is one of the defining scientific problems of our age. Within the standard model of cosmology, the repulsive 'dark energy' supposedly responsible has no explanation at a fundamental level, despite many varied attempts. A further important dilemma in the standard model is the Lithium problem, which is the substantial mismatch between the theoretical prediction for 7-Li from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the value that we observe today. This observation is one of the very few we have from along our past worldline as opposed to our past lightcone. By releasing the untested assumption that the universe is homogeneous on very large scales, both apparent acceleration and the Lithium problem can be easily accounted for as different aspects of cosmic inhomogeneity, without causing problems for other cosmological phenomena such as the cosmic microwave background. We illustrate this in the context of a void model.

14 pages, 4 figures. v2: minor rearrangements in the text, comments and references expanded, results unchanged

References in corpus (16)

• A Redetermination of the Hubble Constant with the Hubble Space Telescope from a Differential Distance Ladder
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis in the Precision Cosmology Era
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from precision cosmology to fundamental physics
• A Bitter Pill: The Primordial Lithium Problem Worsens
• A probable stellar solution to the cosmological lithium discrepancy
• The primordial abundance of 4He: evidence for non-standard big bang nucleosynthesis
• Confronting Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi models with Observational Cosmology
• First-Year Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSS-II) Supernova Results: Constraints on Non-Standard Cosmological Models
• Deuterium Abundance in the Most Metal-Poor Damped Lyman alpha System: Converging on Omega_baryons
• A New Approach to Systematic Uncertainties and Self-Consistency in Helium Abundance Determinations
• Mimicking Dark Energy with Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi Models: Weak Central Singularities and Critical Points
• Can we avoid dark energy?
• Model-independent cosmological constraints from the CMB
• Deuterium astration in the local disc and beyond
• CMB observations in LTB universes: Part I: Matching peak positions in the CMB spectrum
• Inhomogeneous Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Revisited

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Establishing homogeneity of the universe in the shadow of dark energy
• A new tension in the cosmological model from primordial deuterium?
• The Local Hole revealed by galaxy counts and redshifts
• Modified big bang nucleosynthesis with non-standard neutron sources
• Tension in the Void: Cosmic Rulers Strain Inhomogeneous Cosmologies
• The Copernican principle in light of the latest cosmological data
• Mirror matter can alleviate the cosmological lithium problem
• Evolution of density perturbations in large void universe
• Population II stars and the Spite plateau; Stellar evolution models with mass loss
• Relativistic cosmology number densities in void-Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi models
• Testing LTB Void Models Without the Cosmic Microwave Background or Large Scale Structure: New Constraints from Galaxy Ages
• Spherically symmetric cosmological spacetimes with dust and radiation - numerical implementation
• Cosmological model dependence of the galaxy luminosity function: far-infrared results in the Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi model
• Two-point correlation function of density perturbations in a large void universe
• Comparison of two approximation schemes for solving perturbations in a LTB cosmological model
• Newtonian self-gravitating system in a relativistic huge void universe model