A Pop III generated dust screen at z~16

Abstract

The search for alternative cosmological models is largely motivated by the growing discordance between the predictions of LCDM and the ever improving observations, such as the disparity in the value of H_0 measured at low and high redshifts. One model, in particular, known as the R_h=ct universe, has been highly successful in mitigating or removing all of the inconsistencies. In this picture, however, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) would have emerged at a redshift z ~ 16, rather than via fluctuations in the recombination zone at z~1080. We demonstrate here that a CMB created in the early Universe, followed by scattering through a Pop III generated dust screen, cannot yet be ruled out by the current data. Indeed, the Planck measurements provide a hint of a ~2-4% frequency dependence in the CMB power spectrum, which would be naturally explained as a variation in the optical depth through the dust, but not a Thomson scattering-dominated recombination environment. Upcoming measurements should be able to easily distinguish between these two scenarios, e.g., via the detection of recombination lines at z~1080, which would completely eliminate the dust reprocessing idea.

14 pages, 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (18)

• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyα forest of BOSS DR11 quasars
• Improving Cosmological Distance Measurements by Reconstruction of the Baryon Acoustic Peak
• Resumming Cosmological Perturbations via the Lagrangian Picture: One-loop Results in Real Space and in Redshift Space
• On the Robustness of the Acoustic Scale in the Low-Redshift Clustering of Matter
• Radiative torques: Analytical Model and Basic Properties
• The Destruction of Cosmological Minihalos by Primordial Supernovae
• Calibrating the Baryon Oscillation Ruler for Matter and Halos
• Lines in the Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum from the Epoch of Cosmological Hydrogen Recombination
• Lines in the cosmic microwave background spectrum from the epoch of cosmological helium recombination
• How Many $e$-Folds Should We Expect from High-Scale Inflation?
• The CMB Quadrupole depression produced by early fast-roll inflation: MCMC analysis of WMAP and SDSS data
• $B$-mode forecast of CMB-Bh$\overline{a}$rat
• Hint of a truncated primordial spectrum from the CMB large-scale anomalies
• Quantum Fluctuations at the Planck Scale
• Missing large-angle correlations versus even-odd point-parity imbalance in the cosmic microwave background
• Model Selection using Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Final SDSS-IV Release
• On the Absorption Properties of Metallic Needles
• Optical properties of elongated conducting grains

Cited by in corpus (1)

• What if the universe expands linearly? A local general relativity to solve the "zero active mass" problem