2018/10/11 by John T. Giblin, John T. Giblin Jr, James B. Mertens +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Cosmological constant #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gravitation #Harmonic #Metric (unit) #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Theoretical physics #Universe #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.99.023527
published as Phys. Rev. D 99, 023527 (2019)
arxiv created 2018/10/11 · openalex publication_date 2019/01/28 · arxiv updated 2019/02/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Standard cosmological models rely on an approximate treatment of gravity, utilizing solutions of the linearized Einstein equations as well as physical approximations. In an era of precision cosmology, we should ask: are these approximate predictions sufficiently accurate for comparison to observations, and can we draw meaningful conclusions about properties of our Universe from them? In this work we examine the accuracy of linearized gravity in the presence of collisionless matter and a cosmological constant utilizing fully general relativistic simulations. We observe the gauge dependence of corrections to linear theory, and note the amplitude of these corrections. For perturbations whose amplitudes are in line with expectations from the standard \mathrm\ensuremathΛ cold dark matter model, we find that the full, general relativistic metric is well described by linear theory in Newtonian and harmonic gauges, while the metric in comoving-synchronous gauge is not. For the most extreme observed structures in our Universe, such as supervoids, our results suggest that corrections to linear gravitational theory can reach or surpass the percent level in all gauges.