Absence of Ghost Images Excludes Large Values of the Cosmological Constant.pdf

ABSENCE OF GHOST IMAGES EXCLUDES LARGE VALUES OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT J. M. Eppley1 and R. B. Partridge Department of Astronomy, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041 ABSTRACT We used the 1.4 GHz NRAO2 NVSS survey to search for “ghost” images of radio sources, expected in cosmologies with a positive cosmological constant and positive space curvature. No statistically significant evidence for “ghost” images was found, placing constraints on the values of Λ, the space curvature or the duration of the radio-luminous phase of extragalactic radio sources. 1. INTRODUCTION Cosmologists now accept the possibility of a non-zero value for the cosmological constant, Λ, which implies a small vacuum energy density in the Universe. A small positive value of Λ would help to resolve the age problem (some measures of the age of the Universe appear to exceed the time since the Big Bang); to explain the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the Universe (Perlmutter et al., 1997; Reiss et al., 1998; Garnavich et al., 1998), or to ensure zero space curvature as favored by inflationary models even if the density of matter in the Universe is below its critical value, ρc. Values of Λ close to 2 H02 = (8-13) × 10-36 sec-2 have been suggested (see Carroll et al., 1992, for a review), corresponding to ?Λ = 0.67 where ?Λ ≡ ρΛ/ρc. If Λ is somewhat larger, however, so that ? + ?m 1, the space curvature of the Universe becomes positive, even for very low matter densities, ?m. We investigate one consequence of values of Λ close to or exceeding 3 H02: light from a source can reach an observer from two opposite directions in a spatially closed Universe, as sketched in Fig. 1. 1 Current address: Art Technology Group, 101 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02199. 2 The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Unive