Do we live in an inhomogeneous universe?

por Marco Regis (INFN & Univ. Torino)

martes 13 dic. 2011 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios IFIC (Edf. Institutos de Investigación)

The dimming of Type Ia supernovae could be the result of Hubble-scale inhomogeneity in the matter and spatial curvature, rather than signaling the presence of a dark energy component. We will show that such models can account for the lithium problem of standard Big bang nucleosynthesis and fit the detailed spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We will describe a full treatment of the radiation in inhomogeneous models which is necessary if we are to understand the full constraints from the CMB, as well as other observations which rely on it, such as spectral distortions of the black body spectrum, the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect or the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. Although still in the context of toy cases, the agreement of inhomogeneous models with observed background dynamics of the universe suggests they deserve further investigation.