Both cosmological expansion and black holes are ubiquitous features of our observable Universe, yet exact solutions connecting the two have remained elusive. To this end, we study self-gravitating classical fields within dynamical spherically symmetr
ic solutions that can describe black holes in an expanding universe. After attempting a perturbative approach of a known black-hole solution with scalar hair, we show by exact methods that the unique scalar field action with first-order derivatives that can source shear-free expansion around a black hole requires noncanonical kinetic terms. The resulting action is an incompressible limit of k-essence, otherwise known as the cuscuton theory, and the spacetime it describes is the McVittie metric. We further show that this solution is an exact solution to the vacuum Hov{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity with anisotropic Weyl symmetry.
Peculiar velocities in the nearby Universe can be measured via the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect. Using a statistical method based on an optimised cross-correlation with nearby galaxies, we extract the kSZ signal generated by plasma halo of
galaxies from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies observed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Marginalising over the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich contribution from clusters of galaxies, possible unresolved point source contamination, and Galactic foregrounds (dust, synchrotron and free-free emission), we report a kSZ bulk flow signal present at the 90% confidence level in the seven-year WMAP data. When only galaxies within 50 Mpc/h are included in the kSZ template we find a bulk flow in the CMB frame of |V|=533 +/- 263 km/s, in the direction l=324 +/- 27, b=-7 +/- 17, consistent with bulk flow measurements on a similar scale using classical distance indicators. We show how this comparison constrains the (ionised) baryonic budget in the local universe. On very large (~ 500 Mpc/h) scales, we find a 95% upper limit of 470 km/s, inconsistent with some analyses of bulk flow of clusters from the kSZ. We estimate that the significance of the bulk flow signal may increase to 3-5 sigma using data from the PLANCK probe.
We show that in cases of marginal detections (~ 3sigma), such as that of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) in cosmology, the often-used Gaussian approximation to the full likelihood is very poor, especially beyond ~3sigma. This can radically alter
confidence intervals on parameters and implies that one cannot naively extrapolate 1sigma-errorbars to 3sigma, and beyond. We propose a simple fitting formula which corrects for this effect in posterior probabilities arising from marginal detections. Alternatively the full likelihood should be used for parameter estimation rather than the Gaussian approximation of a just mean and an error.
We present a case that current observations may already indicate new gravitational physics on cosmological scales. The excess of power seen in the Lyman-alpha forest and small-scale CMB experiments, the anomalously large bulk flows seen both in pecul
iar velocity surveys and in kinetic SZ, and the higher ISW cross-correlation all indicate that structure may be more evolved than expected from LCDM. We argue that these observations find a natural explanation in models with infinite-volume (or, at least, cosmological-size) extra dimensions, where the graviton is a resonance with a tiny width. The longitudinal mode of the graviton mediates an extra scalar force which speeds up structure formation at late times, thereby accounting for the above anomalies. The required graviton Compton wavelength is relatively small compared to the present Hubble radius, of order 300-600 Mpc. Moreover, with certain assumptions about the behavior of the longitudinal mode on super-Hubble scales, our modified gravity framework can also alleviate the tension with the low quadrupole and the peculiar vanishing of the CMB correlation function on large angular scales, seen both in COBE and WMAP. This relies on a novel mechanism that cancels a late-time ISW contribution against the primordial Sachs-Wolfe amplitude.
