Saturday 21 November 2015

cosmology - Is the metric expansion of space relatively uniform on different length scales?


Is the Metric expansion of space relatively uniform in space? In other words, loosely speaking, does expansion happens everywhere, and over a wide range of length scales.


For example, the Hubble constant (say 70 km/sec per megaparsec) would be about 2.3E-05 m/s at 10 billion km. Neglecting numerous profound experimental difficulties, if it were possible to make some kind of measurement with a controlled experiment, over such a short distance, would we expect to see expansion locally consistent with the cosmological rate?


Assume the experiment is in a relatively empty area in space, where one is not distracted by large scale structure so that one tries to put all the expansion between those structures and not within those structures.


note: the question is about the expansion rate itself, not about how difficult it would be to measure. The question is also not about how expansion has been historically inferred from earth-bound observations of complex structures like galaxies. It's about the space.



Answer



Such measurements have been done, using lasers reflecting off mirrors on the moon. See e.g the paper Progress in Lunar Laser Ranging Tests of Relativistic Gravity (Williams et. al. 2008) which established an effective limit on the expansion at AU scales that is about 80 times smaller than what would be expected if cosmological expansion applied within our solar system.



As John Rennie explained in an answer to this question, the expansion is a property of the FLRW metric, but the local distribution of matter doesn't match the assumptions for that metric (which hold well enough on cosmological scales). That doesn't prove by itself that a metric that describes our solar system doesn't have expansion, but the experimental evidence is that if it does it is much smaller than you'd expect from a simple extrapolation of Hubble's law down to AU scales.


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