Unimodular Gravity and Averaging

The question of the averaging of inhomogeneous spacetimes in cosmology is important for the correct interpretation of cosmological data. In this paper we suggest a conceptually simpler approach to averaging in cosmology based on the averaging of scalars within unimodular gravity. As an illustration, we consider the example of an exact spherically symmetric dust model, and show that within this approach averaging introduces correlations (corrections) to the effective dynamical evolution equation in the form of a spatial curvature term.