Anisotropic expansion and SNIa: An open issue

Abstract

We review the appropriateness of using SNIa observations to detect potential signatures of anisotropic expansion in the Universe. We focus on Union2 and SNLS3 SNIa datasets and use the hemispherical comparison method to detect possible anisotropic features. Unlike some previous works where non-diagonal elements of the covariance matrix were neglected, we use the full covariance matrix of the SNIa data, thus obtaining more realistic and not underestimated errors. As a matter of fact, the significance of previously claimed detections of a preferred direction in the Union2 dataset completely disappears once we include the effects of using the full covariance matrix. Moreover, we also find that such a preferred direction is aligned with the orthogonal direction of the SDSS observational plane and this suggests a clear indication that the SDSS subsample of the Union2 dataset introduces a significant bias, making the detected preferred direction unphysical. We thus find that current SNIa surveys are inappropriate to test anisotropic features due to their highly non-homogeneous angular distribution in the sky. In addition, after removal of the highest inhomogeneous sub-samples, the number of SNIa is too low. Finally, we take advantage of the particular distribution of SNLS SNIa sub-sample in the SNLS3 data set, in which the observations were taken along four different directions. We fit each direction independently and find consistent results at the 1σ level. Although the likelihoods peak at relatively different values of Ωm, the low number of data along each direction gives rise to large errors so that the likelihoods are sufficiently broad as to overlap within 1σ.