Probing alternative cosmologies through the inverse distance ladder

Understand

We study the implications of a combined analysis of cosmic standard candles and standard rulers on the viability of cosmological models beyond the cosmological concordance model.

• To this end, we employ well-established data in the form of the joint light-curve analysis supernova compilation, baryon acoustic oscillations, and cosmic microwave background data on the one hand, and a recently proposed set of quasars as objects of known brightness on the other hand.
• The advantage of including the latter is that they extend the local distance measures to redshifts which have previously been out of reach and we investigate how this allows one to test cosmologies beyond $\Lambda$CDM.
• While there exist various studies on parametric extensions of $\Lambda$CDM, we present here a comparative study of both parametric and fundamental extensions of the standard cosmology.