Friedmann Equation
Short Topical Videos[edit]
Reference Material[edit]
- Friedmann Equations (Wikipedia)
- Cosmic Dynamics: The Friedmann Equation (David Weinberg, OSU)
- General Relativity, Friedmann Equations, and Accelerating Expansion: A Quick Overview (Slepian, Astrobites)
1 The Friedmann Equation
The Friedmann Equation is an equation of motion for the scale factor in a homogeneous universe. A rigorous derivation requires General Relativity, but we can fake it with a quasi-Newtonian derivation. We will model the universe as an adiabatically () expanding, isotropic, homogeneous medium. Isotropy allows us to use as a scalar. Consider a thin, expanding spherical shell of radius . Birkhoff’s Theorum states that even in GR, the motion of such a shell depends only on the enclosed mass . Thus, the energy per unit mass per unit length is:
We define , and we will show later that is a measure of the curvature of the universe:
where has units of if is dimensionless. Substituting into the above energy equation, and solving for , we get:
In GR, we understand that it is not just mass that curves space, but also energy. Thus, we can generalize this equation to use an energy density , with , giving us:
This is the Friedmann Equation.
1.1 Critical Density
As discussed above, corresponds to a flat, critically bound universe. If we assume , we can solve for the critical density of the universe: the value of that leads to a critically bound universe. To do this, we need a measure of what is. A lot of effort has gone into measuring , the value of the Hubble parameter at the present day, with km s Mpc. Using that
we find that kg m Mpc. This is called the critical density of our (present day) universe. Note that generally, the critical density is time dependent because the Hubble parameter changes with .
1.2 In terms of the Dimensionless Density Parameter
The critical density is an important yardstick for determining how a universe behaves. It is common to measure energy densities relative to this yardstick. We define
to be the dimesionless density parameter. Using this definition and remembering that , we can rewrite the Friedmann equation as: