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A geometric measure of dark energy with pairs of galaxies

Nature volume 468, pages 539–541 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Observations1,2 indicate that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, which is attributed to a ‘dark energy’ component that opposes gravity3,4. There is a purely geometric test of the expansion of the Universe (the Alcock–Paczynski test), which would provide an independent way of investigating the abundance () and equation of state () of dark energy5. It is based on an analysis of the geometrical distortions expected from comparing the real-space and redshift-space shape of distant cosmic structures, but it has proved difficult to implement6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18. Here we report an analysis of the symmetry properties of distant pairs of galaxies from archival data19,20. This allows us to determine that the Universe is flat. By alternately fixing its spatial geometry at and the dark energy equation-of-state parameter at , and using the results of baryon acoustic oscillations, we can establish at the 68.3% confidence level that and .

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Figure 1: Geometry and statistics of binary galactic systems.
Figure 2: Diagram of the average anisotropy of pairs from the SDSS (Data Release 7) 19 and DEEP2 20 data.
Figure 3: Cosmological constraints on the abundance of dark energy ΩX and on its nature .

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Acknowledgements

C.M. thanks J. Bel, P.-E. Crouzet, M. Davis, L. Guzzo, A. Blanchard, E. Branchini, P. S. Corasaniti, A. Ealet, A. Heavens, O. Le Fèvre, L. Moscardini, T. Schucker, P. Taxil and J. M. Virey for discussions. We thank R. Giovanelli, L. Lellouch and P. J. Morrison for reading versions of the manuscript. This paper has greatly benefited from the comments of M. Strauss. C.M. is grateful for support from the Projets Exploratoires Pluridisciplinaires: Physique Théorique et ses Interfaces of the CNRS and from specific project funding of the Institut Universitaire de France.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Physique Théorique, UMR 6207 CNRS—Université de Provence, Campus de Luminy, Case 907, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France ,

    Christian Marinoni & Adeline Buzzi

  2. Institut Universitaire de France, 103 boulevard Saint-Michel, 75005 Paris, France ,

    Christian Marinoni

Authors
  1. Christian Marinoni
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Contributions

C.M elaborated the testing formalism. C.M. and A.B. worked on the comparison of theoretical predictions with observations.

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Correspondence to Christian Marinoni.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

The posterior likelihood shown in Fig. 3 is available at http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~marinoni/Plik.tar.gz.

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Supplementary Information

The file contains Supplementary Text and Data I-VI, additional references, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Figures 1-5 with legends. (PDF 1200 kb)

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Marinoni, C., Buzzi, A. A geometric measure of dark energy with pairs of galaxies. Nature 468, 539–541 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09577

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