Should we doubt the cosmological constant?

Details Should we doubt the cosmological constant? Should we doubt the cosmological constant?

2010-05-20

arxiv.org/abs/1005.3655v1

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 410, 4, 2488-2496 (2011)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

10 pages, 2 figures

Scientific paper

10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17614.x

While Bayesian model selection is a useful tool to discriminate between competing cosmological models, it only gives a relative rather than an absolute measure of how good a model is. Bayesian doubt introduces an unknown benchmark model against which the known models are compared, thereby obtaining an absolute measure of model performance in a Bayesian framework. We apply this new methodology to the problem of the dark energy equation of state, comparing an absolute upper bound on the Bayesian evidence for a presently unknown dark energy model against a collection of known models including a flat LambdaCDM scenario. We find a strong absolute upper bound to the Bayes factor B between the unknown model and LambdaCDM, giving B < 3. The posterior probability for doubt is found to be less than 6% (with a 1% prior doubt) while the probability for LambdaCDM rises from an initial 25% to just over 50% in light of the data. We conclude that LambdaCDM remains a sufficient phenomenological description of currently available observations and that there is little statistical room for model improvement.

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