Abstract Observations show that Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are dimmer than expected from a matter dominated Universe. It has been suggested that this observed phenomenon can also be explained using light absorption instead of dark energy. However, there is a serious degeneracy between the cosmic absorption parameter and the present matter density parameter Ωm when one tries to place constraints on the cosmic opacity using SNe Ia data. We combine the latest baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and Union2 SNe Ia data in order to break this degeneracy. Assuming a flat ΛCDM model, we find that, although an opaque Universe is favored by SNe Ia+BAO since the best fit value of the cosmic absorption parameter is larger than zero, Ωm = 1 is ruled out at the 99.7% confidence level. Thus, cosmic opacity is not sufficient to account for the present observations and dark energy or modified gravity is still required.
Keywords cosmology: dark energy — cosmology: distance scale
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