2015/12/31 by James Overduin, Nathan Prins, Joohan Lee
Physics and Astronomy · #Context (archaeology) #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark energy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #General relativity #Inflation (cosmology) #Metric expansion of space #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Scalar field #Scale factor (cosmology) #Supernova #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1142/s0218271816500693
10 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2016/02/15 · openalex publication_date 2016/04/28 · arxiv updated 2016/05/25 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We use observational data on the magnitude-redshift relation for Type Ia supernovae (SNeIa) together with constraints on the ages of the oldest stars to rule out a higher-dimensional extension of General Relativity with a negative kinetic energy scalar field. This theory is of considerable physical interest because it produces accelerated expansion at both early and late times with a single new field, as in quintessential inflation scenarios. It is also of mathematical interest because it is characterized by an analytic expression for the macroscopic scale factor [Formula: see text]. We show that cosmological solutions of this theory can be usefully parametrized by a single quantity, the lookback time [Formula: see text] corresponding to the transition from deceleration to acceleration. Supernovae data from the recently released Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) Union 2.1 compilation single out a narrow range of values for [Formula: see text]. In the context of the theory, however, these same values of [Formula: see text] imply that the universe is much older than the oldest observed stars.