Alleviating the Hubble tension with a local void and transitions of the absolute magnitude
Jing-Yi Jia, Jia-Lei Niu, Da-Chun Qiang, Hao Wei · 2025 · 7 citationsRead the paper
Nowadays, one of the well-known serious challenges in cosmology is the Hubble tension, namely the discrepancy between the Hubble constants from the local observation of Type Ia supernova (SNIa) and the high-$z$ observation of cosmic microwave background (CMB). Here, we are interested in alleviating the Hubble tension with a local void. The key idea is assuming that we live in a locally underdense void, where one will feel a faster expansion rate compared to the cosmic average. In the literature, it was found that a local void cannot satisfyingly alleviate the Hubble tension, since it is not preferred over the $Λ$CDM model by the observations such as the Pantheon SNIa sample, especially in terms of the information criteria AIC and BIC. In the present work, we try to alleviate the Hubble tension with a local void and transitions of the absolute magnitude $M$, by using the Pantheon+ SNIa sample alone or jointly with the CMB data of Planck 2018. We find that the Hubble tension can be satisfyingly alleviated, while the $Λ$LTB void models are strongly preferred by the observations.
What the full text shows
Theory or simulation- The Hubble tension is satisfyingly alleviated using a local void combined with transitions of the absolute magnitude M. (Using Pantheon+ SNIa sample alone or jointly with Planck 2018 CMB data)
- The $\Lambda$LTB void models are strongly preferred over the $\Lambda$CDM models. (Based on AIC, BIC, and Bayesian evidence using Pantheon+ SNIa data)
- Setup
- Pantheon+ SNIa sample (1701 light curves of 1550 SNIa) and Planck 2018 CMB data.
- How
- The authors used the Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) metric to model a locally underdense void and introduced transitions in the absolute magnitude $M$ of SNIa. They constrained model parameters by minimizing $\chi^2$ using the Cobaya MCMC package and compared models using AIC, BIC, and Bayesian evidence.
Summarized by Gemma 4 from the open-access full text · 8 Oct 2026. Read it