A covariant road to spatial averaging in cosmology: Scalar corrections to the cosmological equations

A consistent approach to cosmology requires an explicit averaging of the Einstein equations, to describe a homogeneous and isotropic geometry. Such an averaging will in general modify the Einstein equations. The averaging procedure due to Buchert has attracted considerable attention recently since it offers the tantalizing hope of explaining the phenomenon of dark energy through such corrections. This approach has been criticized, however, on the grounds that its effects may be gauge artifacts. We apply the fully covariant formalism of Zalaletdinov's macroscopic gravity and show that, after making some essential gauge choices, the cosmological equations receive space-time scalar corrections which are therefore observable in principle, and further, that the broad structure of these corrections is identical to those derived by Buchert.