‘Swiss-cheese’ inhomogeneous cosmology and the dark energy problem

Abstract

We study an exact swiss-cheese model of the Universe, where inhomogeneous LTB\npatches are embedded in a flat FLRW background, in order to see how\nobservations of distant sources are affected. We find negligible integrated\neffect, suppressed by (L/R_{H})^3 (where L is the size of one patch, and R_{H}\nis the Hubble radius), both perturbatively and non-perturbatively. We\ndisentangle this effect from the Doppler term (which is much larger and has\nbeen used recently \\cite{BMN} to try to fit the SN curve without dark energy)\nby making contact with cosmological perturbation theory.\n