Constraining sudden future singularity models

One of the key challenges facing cosmologists today is the nature of the mysterious dark energy introduced in the standard model of cosmology to account for the current accelerating expansion of the universe. In this regard, many other non‐standard cosmologies have been proposed which would eliminate the need to explicitly include any form of dark energy. One such model is the Sudden Future Singularity (SFS) model, in which no equation of state linking the energy density and the pressure in the universe is assumed to hold. In this model it is possible to have a blow up of the pressure occurring in the near future while the energy density would remain unaffected. The particular evolution of the scale factor of the Universe in this model that results in a singular behaviour of the pressure also admits acceleration in the current era as required. In this paper we compare an example SFS model with the current data from high redshift supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the cosmic microwave background (CMBR). We explore the limits placed on the SFS model parameters by these current data and discuss the viability of the SFS model in question as an alternative to the standard concordance cosmology.