McVittie–Plummer Spacetime: Plummer Sphere Immersed in the FLRW Universe

Abstract

The McVittie–Plummer spacetime is a spherically symmetric inhomogeneous cosmological model that represents a spherical star system embedded in a standard Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) cosmological model. We study the main physical properties of this gravitational field. Regarding the interplay between the physics of the local system and the expanding background, we employ the Misner–Sharp mass–energy function to show that there is a relatively weak time-dependent general relativistic coupling between the astrophysical system and the background FLRW cosmological model. The coupling term is proportional to the inverse of the scale factor and decreases as the Universe expands.

Keywords

• Cosmology
• General relativity
• Gravitation