Testing backreaction effects with observations

Abstract

In order to quantitatively test the ability of averaged inhomogeneous cosmologies to correctly describe observations of the large scale properties of the Universe, we introduce a smoothed template metric corresponding to a constant spatial curvature model at any time, but with an evolving curvature parameter. This metric is used to compute quantities along an approximate effective lightcone of the averaged model of the Universe. As opposed to the standard Friedmann model, we parameterize this template metric by exact scaling properties of an averaged inhomogeneous cosmology, and we also motivate this form of the metric by results on a geometrical smoothing of inhomogeneous cosmological hypersurfaces. We test our hypothesis for the template metric against supernova data and the position of the CMB peaks, and infer the goodness--of--fit and parameter uncertainties. We find that averaged inhomogeneous models can reproduce the observations without requiring an additional Dark Energy component (though a volume acceleration is still needed), and that current data do not disfavour our main assumption on the effective lightcone structure. We also show that the experimental uncertainties on the angular diameter distance and the Hubble parameter from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations measurements -- forseen in future surveys like the proposed EUCLID satellite project -- are sufficiently small to distinguish between a FLRW template geometry and the template geometry with consistently evolving curvature. (Abridged)