Cosmology when living near the Great Attractor

Abstract

If we live in the vicinity of the hypothesized Great Attractor, the age of the universe as inferred from the local expansion rate can be off by three per cent. We study the effect that living inside or near a massive overdensity has on cosmological parameters induced from observations of supernovae, the Hubble parameter and the Cosmic Microwave Background. We compare the results to those for an observer in a perfectly homogeneous LCDM universe. We find that for instance the inferred value for the global Hubble parameter changes by around three per cent if we happen to live inside a massive overdensity such as the hypothesized Great Attractor. Taking into account the effect of such structures on our perception of the universe makes cosmology perhaps less precise, but more accurate.

8 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (32)

• Seven-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• Efficient Computation of CMB anisotropies in closed FRW models
• Cosmological parameters from CMB and other data: a Monte-Carlo approach
• A Redetermination of the Hubble Constant with the Hubble Space Telescope from a Differential Distance Ladder
• First-year Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSS-II) Supernova Results: Hubble Diagram and Cosmological Parameters
• An inhomogeneous alternative to dark energy?
• Confronting Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi models with Observational Cosmology
• Probing the anisotropic local universe and beyond with SNe Ia data
• Reconstructed Density and Velocity Fields from the 2MASS Redshift Survey
• On cosmological observables in a swiss-cheese universe
• The effect of inhomogeneous expansion on the supernova observations
• CMB anisotropies seen by an off-center observer in a spherically symmetric inhomogeneous universe
• The effect of peculiar velocities on supernova cosmology
• Numerical computation of real or complex elliptic integrals
• Testing the Void against Cosmological data: fitting CMB, BAO, SN and H0
• Precision cosmology defeats void models for acceleration
• Mapping Large-Scale Structures Behind the Galactic Plane: The Second CIZA Subsample
• Distances and lensing in cosmological void models
• On The Origin of the Local Group's Peculiar Velocity
• The Effect of Large-Scale Inhomogeneities on the Luminosity Distance
• Model-independent cosmological constraints from the CMB
• Light Propagation and Large-Scale Inhomogeneities
• Cosmological Observations in a Local Void
• The Velocity Field of the Local Universe from Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae
• Measuring the cosmological bulk flow using the peculiar velocities of supernovae
• Measuring our peculiar velocity on the CMB with high-multipole off-diagonal correlations
• Swiss Cheese and a Cheesy CMB
• Observational constraints on the LLTB model
• Residual Hubble-bubble effects on supernova cosmology
• Exact spherically-symmetric inhomogeneous model with n perfect fluids
• Perceiving the equation of state of Dark Energy while living in a Cold Spot
• Effects of voids on the reconstruction of the equation of state of Dark Energy

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Cosmic variance and the measurement of the local Hubble parameter
• Uncertainty on w from large-scale structure
• What if Planck's Universe isn't flat?
• Intrinsic uncertainty on the nature of dark energy
• How real-time cosmology can distinguish between different anisotropic models
• Conditions for low-redshift positive apparent acceleration in smooth inhomogeneous models
• The Great Wall of SDSS galaxies