Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

"Errors in the measured cosmological constant from local inhomogeneity"
I will discuss some of the ways that local cosmological inhomogeneity has been found
to affect our interpretation of the measurements of the redshifts and luminosity
distances of Type Ia supernovae. This discussion will first focus on the systematic
corrections that one would find even for very large sample sizes as a result of the
"fitting problem," wherein the fitting of data to what we would see in a homogeneous
universe introduces errors due to the nonlinearity of general relativity. I will then
discuss the related non-systematic errors and their expected impact.