Dark Energy Explained by a Bias in the Measurements

Abstract

Typical cosmological models are based on the postulate that space is homogeneous. Space however contains overdense regions in which matter is concentrating, leaving underdense regions of almost void. The evolution of the scale factor of the universe has been established from measurements on SNIa. Since such events occur in regions were matter is present, we may expect that most of the SNIa are located in overdense regions. This means that the evolution of the scale factor has been established in a biased manner, by considering only information coming from overdense regions, excluding the one from the underdense regions. We develop a simple model to analyze the effect of this bias, and show that it leads to the appearance of a new tensor in the Einstein equation of general relativity, which can account for the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. We further show that this tensor tends to be proportional to the FLRW metric tensor, and that the constant of proportionality quantitatively corresponds to the measured cosmological constant with a remarkable accuracy. We finally explain why these properties remain valid for other techniques used in determining the dynamics of the universe, such as the baryon acoustic oscillations.