cxt282

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24475

David F. Crawford

Type Ia supernovae have light curves that have widths and magnitudes that can be used for testing cosmologies and they provide one of the few direct measurements of time dilation. It is shown that the standard analysis that calibrates the light curve against a rest-frame average (such as SALT2) removes all the cosmological information from the calibrated light curves. Consequently type Ia supernovae calibrated with these methods cannot be used to investigate cosmology. The major evidence that supports the hypothesis of a static universe is that the measurements of the widths of the raw light curves of type Ia supernovae do not show any time dilation. The intrinsic wavelength dependence shown by the SALT2 calibration templates is also consistent with no time dilation. Using a static cosmological model the peak absolute magnitudes of raw type Ia supernovae observations are also independent of redshift. These results support the hypothesis of a static universe.

Rouzbeh Allahverdi, James B. Dent, Jacek Osinski

We present a scenario for non-thermal production of dark matter from evaporation of primordial black holes. A period of very early matter domination leads to formation of black holes with a maximum mass of $\simeq 2 \times 10^8$ g, whose subsequent evaporation prior to big bang nucleosynthesis can produce all of the dark matter in the universe. We show that the correct relic abundance can be obtained in this way for thermally underproduced dark matter in the 100 GeV-10 TeV mass range. To achieve this, the scalar power spectrum at small scales relevant for black hole formation should be enhanced by a factor of ${\cal O}(10^5)$ relative to the scales accessible by the cosmic microwave background experiments.

Marco Celoria, Marco Celoria, Luigi Pilo

Generic massive gravity models in the unitary gauge correspond to a self-gravitating medium with six degrees of freedom. It is widely believed that massive gravity models with six degrees of freedom have an unavoidable ghost-like instability; however, the corresponding medium has stable phonon-like excitations. The apparent contradiction is solved by the presence of a non-vanishing background pressure and energy density of the medium that opens up a stability window. The result is confirmed by looking at linear stability on an expanding Universe, recovering the flat space stability conditions in the small wavelength limit. Moreover, one can show that under rather mild conditions, no ghost-like instability is present for any wavelength. As a result, exploiting the medium interpretation, a generic massive gravity model with six degrees of freedom is perfectly viable.

Chunshan Lin, Jerome Quintin, Robert H. Brandenberger

We consider a modified gravity model with a massive graviton, but which nevertheless only propagates two gravitational degrees of freedom and which is free of ghosts. We show that non-singular bouncing cosmological background solutions can be generated. In addition, the mass term for the graviton prevents anisotropies from blowing up in the contracting phase and also suppresses the spectrum of gravitational waves compared to that of the scalar cosmological perturbations. This addresses two of the main problems of the matter bounce scenario.