A possible Newtonian interpretation of relativistic cosmological perturbation theory

Abstract

Cosmological perturbations with wavelengths smaller than Hubble radius can be handled in the context of Newtonian theory with very high accuracy. The application of this Newtonian approximation, however, is restricted to nonrelativistic matter and cannot be used for relativistic matter. Recently, by modifying the continuity equation, Lima, et. al., extended the domain of applicability of Newtonian cosmology to radiation dominated phase. We adopted this continuity equation to re-examine linear cosmological perturbation theory for a two fluid universe with uniform pressure. We study the evolution equations for density contrasts and their validity in different epochs and on scales larger than Hubble radius and compare the results with the full relativistic approach. The comparison shows the high accuracy of this approximation.