Local gravitational redshifts can bias cosmological measurements
- Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
- School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland, QLD 4072 (Australia)
- Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Denmark (Denmark)
Measurements of cosmological parameters via the distance-redshift relation usually rely on models that assume a homogenous universe. It is commonly presumed that the large-scale structure evident in our Universe has a negligible impact on the measurement if distances probed in observations are sufficiently large (compared to the scale of inhomogeneities) and are averaged over different directions on the sky. This presumption does not hold when considering the effect of the gravitational redshift caused by our local gravitational potential, which alters light coming from all distances and directions in the same way. Despite its small magnitude, this local gravitational redshift gives rise to noticeable effects in cosmological inference using SN Ia data. Assuming conservative prior knowledge of the local potential given by sampling a range of gravitational potentials at locations of Milky-Way-like galaxies identified in cosmological simulations, we show that ignoring the gravitational redshift effect in a standard data analysis leads to an additional systematic error of ∼1% in the determination of density parameters and the dark energy equation of state. We conclude that our local gravitational field affects our cosmological inference at a level that is important in future observations aiming to achieve percent-level accuracy.
- OSTI ID:
- 22525720
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 07; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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