A determination of the Hubble constant without outlier rejection algorithm

Noviembre 16, 2017
De 3:00pm hasta 4:15pm

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Specialist level
Speaker: 
Wilmar Cardona
Institution: 
IFT UAM-CSIC
Location&Place: 

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Abstract: 

Pinning down the Hubble constant is crucial for our understanding of the standard model of cosmology. It sets the scale for all cosmological times and distances and it allows to tackle cosmological parameters, breaking degeneracies among them (e.g., the equation of state for dark energy and the mass of neutrinos). Given the current discrepancy between model dependent and model independent determinations of the expansion rate of the universe, it is important to re-analyse current data sets by using different statistical approaches. The model independent determination of the Hubble constant uses a laddering approach and an outlier rejection algorithm. In this talk I will present a statistical method which avoids subjective rejection criteria for outliers and offers a way to test data sets for unknown systematics; I will show results for a re-analysis of recent Cepheid data (Riess et al. 2011 and Riess et al. 2016) which are in good agreement with results from Riess et al. 2016.