Abstract. There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether the effects of averaging out inhomogeneities ('backreaction') in cosmology can be large enough to account for the acceleration of the scale factor in the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) models. In particular, some simple models of structure formation studied in the literature seem to indicate that this is indeed possible, and it has also been suggested that the perturbed FLRW framework is no longer a good approximation during structure formation, when the density contrast becomes non-linear. In this work we attempt to clarify the situation to some extent, using a fully relativistic model of pressureless spherical collapse. We find that whereas averaging during structure formation can lead to acceleration via a selective choice of averaging domains, the acceleration is not present when more generic domains are used for averaging. Further, we show that for most of the duration of the collapse, matter velocities remain small, and the perturbed FLRW form of the metric can be explicitly recovered, in the structure formation phase. We also discuss the fact that the magnitude of the average effects of inhomogeneities depends on the scale of averaging, and while it may not be completely negligible on intermediate scales, it is expected to remain small when averaging on suitably large scales.

Key words: dark energy theory; cosmological perturbation theory; gravity

Received 24 January 2008, accepted for publication 29 February 2008
Published 25 March 2008