Calibrating the cosmic distance scale ladder: the role of the sound-horizon scale and the local expansion rate as distance anchors

2014/11/30 by Antonio J. Cuesta, Licia Verde, Adam Riess +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Baryon acoustic oscillations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic distance ladder #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark energy #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Horizon #Metric expansion of space #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Redshift #astro-ph.CO

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stv261

published as Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 448, 3463, 2015 · 10 pages, 8 figures. Matches the version accepted by MNRAS. This version includes an additional BAO measurement (SDSS DR7 MGS) in the analysis. As a result, numerical values and figures have been recomputed. We find no significant changes due to the inclusion of this additional dataset

arxiv created 2015/02/07 · openalex publication_date 2015/03/11 · arxiv updated 2022/01/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We exploit cosmological model-independent measurements of the expansion history of the Universe to provide a cosmic distance ladder. These are supernovae Type Ia used as standard candles (at redshift between 0.01 and 1.3) and baryon acoustic oscillations (at redshifts between 0.1 and 0.8) as standard rulers. We calibrate (anchor) the ladder in two ways: first using the local H0 value as an anchor at z = 0 (effectively calibrating the standard candles) and secondly using the cosmic microwave background-inferred sound-horizon scale as an anchor (giving the standard ruler length) as an inverse distance ladder. Both methods are consistent, but the uncertainty in the expansion history H(z) is smaller if the sound-horizon scale is used. We present inferred values for the sound horizon at radiation drag rd which do not rely on assumptions about the early expansion history nor on cosmic microwave background measurements but on the cosmic distance ladder and baryon acoustic oscillations measurements. We also present derived values of H0 from the inverse distance ladder and we show that they are in very good agreement with the extrapolated value in a Λ cold dark matter model from Planck cosmic microwave background data.

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