Shifting the Universe: early dark energy and standard rulers

The presence of dark energy at high redshift influences both the cosmic sound horizon and the distance to last scattering of the cosmic microwave background. We demonstrate that, through the degeneracy in their ratio, early dark energy can lie hidden in the CMB temperature and polarization spectra, leading to an unrecognized shift in the sound horizon. If the sound horizon is then used as a standard ruler, as in baryon acoustic oscillations, then the derived cosmological parameters can be nontrivially biased. Fitting for the absolute ruler scale (just as supernovae must be fitted for the absolute candle magnitude) removes the bias but decreases the leverage of the BAO technique by a factor of two.