Cosmological observations are normally fit under the assumption that the dark
sector can be decomposed into dark matter and dark energy components. However,
as long as the probes remain purely gravitational, there is no unique
decomposition and observations can only constrain a single dark fluid; this is
known as the dark degeneracy. We use observations to directly constrain this
dark fluid in a model-independent way, demonstrating in particular that the
data cannot be fit by a dark fluid with a single constant equation of state.
Parameterizing the dark fluid equation of state by a variety of polynomials in
the scale factor a, we use current kinematical data to constrain the
parameters. While the simplest interpretation of the dark fluid remains that it
is comprised of separate dark matter and cosmological constant contributions,
our results cover other model types including unified dark energy/matter
scenarios.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures incorporated. Updated to new observational data
including SHOES determination of H0; new citations adde
