Measuring Dark Energy with Gamma‐Ray Bursts and Other Cosmological Probes

Abstract

It has been widely shown that cosmological parameters and dark energy can be constrained by using data from Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy, the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the X-ray gas mass fraction in clusters, and the linear growth rate of perturbations at z = 0.15 as obtained from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. Recently, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have also been argued to be promising standard candles for cosmography. In this paper, we present constraints on the cosmological parameters and dark energy by combining a recent GRB sample including 69 events with the other cosmological probes. First, we find that for the ΛCDM cosmology this combination makes the constraints stringent, and the best fit is close to the flat universe. Second, we fit the flat Cardassian expansion model and find that this model is consistent with the ΛCDM cosmology. Third, we present constraints on several two-parameter dark energy models and find that these models are also consistent with the ΛCDM cosmology. Finally, we reconstruct the dark energy equation of state parameter w(z) and the deceleration parameter q(z). We see that the acceleration could have started at a redshift from zt = 0.40 to 0.65. This difference in the transition redshift is due to different dark energy models that we adopt. The most stringent constraint on w(z) lies in the redshift range z ~ 0.3-0.6.