Can the cosmological constant be mimicked by smooth large-scale inhomogeneities for more than one observable?

Abstract

As an alternative to dark energy it has been suggested that we may be at the center of an inhomogeneous isotropic universe described by a Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) solution of Einstein's field equations. In order to test such an hypothesis we calculate the low redshift expansion of the luminosity distance DL(z) and the redshift spherical shell mass density mn(z) for a central observer in a LTB space without cosmological constant and show how they cannot fit the observations implied by a ΛCDM model if the conditions to avoid a weak central singularity are imposed, i.e. if the matter distribution is smooth everywhere. Our conclusions are valid for any value of the cosmological constant, not only for ΩΛ > 1/3 as implied by previous proofs that qapp0 has to be positive in a smooth LTB space, based on considering only the luminosity distance. The observational signatures of smooth LTB matter dominated models are fundamentally different from the ones of ΛCDM models not only because it is not possible to reproduce a negative apparent central deceleration qapp0, but because of deeper differences in their space-time geometry which make impossible solve the inversion problem when more than one observable is considered, and emerge at any redshift, not only for z = 0.