Testing power-law cosmology with galaxy clusters

Abstract

Aims. Power-law cosmologies, in which the cosmological scale factor evolves as a power law in time, with , regardless of the matter content or cosmological epoch, is comfortably concordant with a host of cosmological observations.Methods. In this article, we use recent measurements of the X-ray gas mass fractions in clusters of galaxies to constrain the α parameter with curvature .Results. We find that the best fit happens for an open scenario with the power index , though the flat and closed model cannot be ruled out with high confidence.Conclusions. Our results are in agreement with other recent analyses and show that the X-ray gas mass fraction measurements in clusters of galaxies provide a complementary test of the power-law cosmology. © 2008 ESO.