Paper 3, Section II, E
The luminosity distance to an astronomical light source is given by , where is the expansion scale factor and is the comoving distance in the universe defined by . A zero-curvature Friedmann universe containing pressure-free matter and a cosmological constant with density parameters and , respectively, obeys the Friedmann equation
where is the Hubble expansion rate of the universe and the subscript 0 denotes present-day values, with .
If is the redshift, show that
Find when and when . Roughly sketch the form of for these two cases. What is the effect of a cosmological constant on the luminosity distance at a fixed value of ? Briefly describe how the relation between luminosity distance and redshift has been used to establish the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.