Precision cosmology defeats void models for acceleration

Abstract

The suggestion that we occupy a privileged position near the centre of a large, nonlinear, and nearly spherical void has recently attracted much attention as an alternative to dark energy. Putting aside the philosophical problems with this scenario, we perform the most complete and up-to-date comparison with cosmological data. We use supernovae and the full cosmic microwave background spectrum as the basis of our analysis. We also include constraints from radial baryonic acoustic oscillations, the local Hubble rate, age, big bang nucleosynthesis, the Compton y-distortion, and for the first time include the local amplitude of matter fluctuations, σ_8. These all paint a consistent picture in which voids are in severe tension with the data. In particular, void models predict a very low local Hubble rate, suffer from an "old age problem", and predict much less local structure than is observed.

22 pages, 12 figures; v2 adds models in closed backgrounds; conclusions strengthened; version accepted to Phys. Rev. D

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Testing the Void against Cosmological data: fitting CMB, BAO, SN and H0
• The Cosmic Microwave Background in an Inhomogeneous Universe - why void models of dark energy are only weakly constrained by the CMB
• Excess Clustering on Large Scales in the MegaZ DR7 Photometric Redshift Survey
• Observational constraints on the LLTB model
• Local and non-local measures of acceleration in cosmology
• Redshift drift in axially symmetric quasi-spherical Szekeres models
• Uncertainty on w from large-scale structure
• Galaxy correlations and the BAO in a void universe: structure formation as a test of the Copernican Principle
• Halo abundances and shear in void models
• Cosmology when living near the Great Attractor