Single Past Null Geodesic in the Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi Cosmology

This work provides a general discussion of the spatially inhomogeneous Lema^itre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) cosmology, as well as its basic properties and many useful relevant quantities, such as the cosmological distances. We apply the concept of the single null geodesic to produce some simple analytical solutions for observational quantities such as the redshift. As an application of the single null geodesic technique, we carry out a fractal approach to the parabolic LTB model, comparing it to the spatially homogeneous Einstein-de Sitter cosmology. The results obtained indicate that the standard model, in this case represented by the Einstein-de Sitter cosmology, can be equivalently described by a fractal distribution of matter, as we found that different single fractal dimensions describe different scale ranges of the parabolic LTB matter distribution. It is shown that at large ranges the parabolic LTB model with fractal dimension equal to 0.5 approximates the matter distribution of the Einstein-de Sitter universe.