Cosmological test using the Hubble diagram of high-z quasars

Abstract

It has been known for over three decades that the monochromatic X-ray and UV luminosities in quasars are correlated, though non-linearly. This offers the possibility of using high-z quasars as standard candles for cosmological testing. In this paper, we use a recently assembled, high-quality catalogue of 1598 quasars extending all the way to redshift similar to 6, to compare the predictions of the R-h = ct and Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda CDM) cosmologies. In so doing, we affirm that the parameters characterizing the correlation depend only weakly on the chosen cosmology, and that both models account very well for the data. Unlike Lambda CDM, however, the R-h = ct model has no free parameters for this work, so the Bayesian Information Criterion favours it over Lambda CDM with a relative likelihood of similar to 88 per cent versus similar to 10 per cent. This result is consistent with the outcome of other comparative tests, many of which have shown that R-h = ct is favoured over the standard model based on a diverse range of observations.