H0and Odds on Cosmology
- 1 November 1996
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astrophysical Journal
- Vol. 471 (1) , 24-29
- https://doi.org/10.1086/177950
Abstract
Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of Cepheids in the Virgo cluster imply a Hubble constant H0 = 80 ± 17 km s−1 Mpc−1; other recent observations find 70 H0 90 km s−1 Mpc−1, with several large excursions in either direction. We attempt to clarify some issues of interpretation of these results for determining the global cosmological parameters Ω and Λ. In this paper, we use these results as a case study in the formalism of Bayesian model comparison, allowing a rigorous comparison of the different cosmological possibilities. We concentrate our analysis on three recent determinations of the Hubble constant, but the results are generic so long as they prefer H0 t0 1, which would seem to require Λ > 0 within the context of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies. With our more rigorous methods, the data do indeed suggest a universe with a nonzero cosmological constant but vanishing curvature: Ω + Λ = 1.Keywords
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