The Robertson-Walker Metric



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The Robertson-Walker Metric

   

The Robertson-Walker (RW) metric is well known in General Relativity as a representation of a universe filled with a pressureless dust. The line-element is usually written in the form:

 

where is the time-dependent scale factor, and for .

In terms of a metric tensor, the RW metric is written as

We shall use an indexed object to represent this metric, as described below.





John Harper
Wed Nov 16 13:34:23 EST 1994