Description of our cosmological spacetime as a perturbed conformal Newtonian metric and implications for the backreaction proposal for the accelerating universe

Abstract

It has been argued that the spacetime of our universe can be accurately described by a perturbed conformal Newtonian metric, and hence even large density inhomogeneities in a dust universe can not change the observables predicted by the homogeneous dust model. In this paper we study a spherically symmetric dust model and illustrate conditions under which large spatial variations in the expansion rate can invalidate the argument.