2008/09/30 by Fergus Simpson, John A. Peacock, Alan F. Heavens
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmological constant #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Geodesic #Gravitation #Gravitational lens #Gravitational lensing formalism #Lambda-CDM model #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Strong gravitational lensing #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.16032.x
10 pages, 6 figures. Added new Section 3 and Figures 1,2,5. To appear in MNRAS
arxiv created 2009/11/14 · openalex publication_date 2009/12/18 · arxiv updated 2012/01/16 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Several recent papers have suggested that the cosmological constant Λ directly influences the gravitational deflection of light. We place this problem in a cosmological context, deriving an expression for the linear potentials which control the cosmological bending of light, finding that it has no explicit dependence on the cosmological constant. To explore the physical origins of the apparent Λ-dependent potential that appears in the static Kottler metric, we highlight the two classical effects which lead to the aberration of light. The first relates to the observer's motion relative to the source, and encapsulates the familiar concept of angular diameter distance. The second term, which has proved to be the source of debate, arises from cosmic acceleration, but is rarely considered since it vanishes for photons with radial motion. This apparent form of light bending gives the appearance of curved geodesics even within a flat and homogeneous universe. However, this cannot be construed as a real lensing effect, since its value depends on the observer's frame of reference. Our conclusion is thus that standard results for gravitational lensing in a universe containing Λ do not require modification, with any influence of Λ being restricted to negligible high-order terms.