The dark degeneracy: On the number and nature of dark components

Abstract

We use that gravity probes only the total energy momentum tensor to show how this leads to a degeneracy for generalised dark energy models. Because of this degeneracy, Omega_m cannot be measured. We demonstrate this explicitely by showing that the CMB and supernova data is compatible with very large and very small values of Omega_m for a specific family of dark energy models. We also show that for the same reason interacting dark energy is always equivalent to a family of non-interacting models. We argue that it is better to face this degeneracy and to parametrise the actual observables.