Testing the cosmological principle: on the time dilation of distant sources

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present a novel test of the cosmological principle: the idea that, on sufficiently large scales, the Universe should appear homogeneous and isotropic to observers comoving with the Hubble flow. This is a fundamental assumption in modern cosmology, underpinning the use of the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric as part of the concordance ΛCDM paradigm. However, the observed dipole imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is interpreted as our departure from the Hubble flow, and such a proper motion will induce a directionally-dependent time dilation over the sky. We illustrate the feasibility of detection of this ‘time dilation dipole’ and sketch the practical steps involved in its extraction from a catalogue of sources with intrinsic time-scales. In essence, whilst the scale of this dilation is small, being of the order of 0.1 per cent, it will in principle be detectable in large-scale surveys of variable cosmological sources, such as quasars and supernovae. The degree of alignment of the time dilation dipole with the kinematic dipole derived from the CMB will provide a new assessment of the cosmological principle and address the tension in dipole measures from other observations.