Luminosity Distance Dispersion in Swiss-cheese Cosmology as a Function of the Hole Size Distribution

Abstract

The luminosity distance–redshift (D L–z) relation derived from Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) yields evidence for a nonzero cosmological constant. SNe Ia analyses typically fit to the functional form D L(z) derived theoretically from the homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric. Yet, the metric in the epoch relevant to SNe Ia measurements deviates slightly from FLRW, due to gravitational clumping of mass into large-scale structures like filaments and voids, whose sizes span many orders of magnitude. The small deviation is modeled typically by scalar perturbations to the FLRW metric. Each line of sight to a SNe Ia passes through a random sequence of structures,..