Testing the phenomenological dipole hypothesis for the variation of alpha with Supernova data

C. NEGRELLI, L. KRAISELBURD, S. LANDAU, E. GARCIA BERRO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Gravitation, Astrophysics, and Cosmology II Argentinian-Brazilian Meeting; 2014

Since the large-number hypothesis proposed by Dirac in 1937, the space-time variation offundamental constants has been an important subject of research. Many observational andexperimental efforts have been made to establish constraints on these variations. The astronomicalmethods are based mainly on the analysis of high-redshift quasar absorption systems.Most of the reported data are, as expected, consistent with null variation of the fine structureconstant. But, there is a certain amount of data obtained with the Keck and VLT telescopes,that led Webb and collaborators to propose a phenomenological model in which alpha mightvary spatially. On the other hand, there has been recent some observational evidence whichcould be interpreded as a hint for deviations from large scale statistical isotropy like the alignmentof low multipoles in the CMB angular power spectrum and large scale alignment in theQSO optical polarization data. In this work we consider the Union2 data of the angular distributionof luminosity distances of Type Ia supernovae (SnIa) to test the phenomenological?dipole-model? proposed by Webb et al.