Unimodular Theory of Gravity in Light of the Latest Cosmological Data

Abstract

The unimodular theory of gravity is an alternative perspective to the traditional general relativity of Einstein and opens new possibilities for exploring its implications in cosmology. In this paper, we investigated Unimodular Gravity (UG) with the cosmological data from the Pantheon sample of Type Ia Supernovae (SNs) (2018), Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs), and the observational H(z) data from the Differential Age method (DA). We also used the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) distance priors from the Planck 2018 results. We considered a model consisting of a generalized cosmological constant, radiation, and a dark matter component along with normal matter. The considered theory respects only unimodular coordinate transformations. We first fit our model with low-redshift data from SNs and DA and determined the value of the model parameters (ξ,H0). We found the best-fit value of parameter ξ=6.03±0.40, which deviates slightly from 6, for which the theory becomes the standard general theory of relativity. We observed a small deviation in the value of the Hubble constant (H0=72.6±3.5 km s−1 Mpc−1) in the UG model compared with the standard ΛCDM model (H0=72.2±1.2 km s−1 Mpc−1). Using the BAO + CMB constraint in the UG model, we obtained H0=68.45±0.66kms−1Mpc−1, and ξ is ∼6.029. For the combined datasets (SN + DA + BAO + CMB), the estimated H0=69.01±0.60kms−1Mpc−1 with ξ∼6.037, and in standard gravity, H0=68.25±0.40kms−1Mpc−1.