Research Note

On the possibility of constraining cosmic topology from the celestial distribution of astronomical objects

Institute of Astronomy, School of Science, University of Tokyo, 2-21-1, Osawa, Mitaka, 181-0015 Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: hfujii@ioa.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Received: 4 April 2011
Accepted: 11 May 2011

Abstract

We present a method of constraining cosmic topology from the distribution of astronomical objects projected on the celestial sphere. This is an extension of the 3D method we introduced in 2011 of searching for two pairs of observed objects (quadruplet) linked by a holonomy; i.e., the method we present here is to search for a pair of celestial sphere n-tuplets for n ≥ 3. We find, however, that this method is impractical for application in realistic situations due to the small signal-to-noise ratio. We conclude therefore that it is unrealistic to constrain the topology of the Universe from the celestial distribution, and the 3D catalogs are necessary for the purpose.