Ted Pyne
Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will be NASA's flagship space telescope of the 2040s, designed to search for life on other planets and to transform broad areas of astrophysics. NASA are seeking international partners, and the UK is…
We derive an expression for the luminosity distance in FLRW spacetimes affected by scalar perturbations. Our expression is complete to linear order and is expressed entirely in terms of standard cosmological parameters and observational…
The ordering of scalar fields after a phase transition in which a group $G$ of global symmetries is spontaneously broken to a subgroup $H$ provides a possible explanation for the origin of structure in the universe, as well as leading to…
We report observational upper limits on the mass-energy of the cosmological gravitational-wave background, from limits on proper motions of quasars. Gravitational waves with periods longer than the time span of observations produce a simple…
Gravitational waves affect the observed direction of light from distant sources. At telescopes, this change in direction appears as periodic variations in the apparent positions of these sources on the sky; that is, as proper motion. A wave…
We obtain analytic formulae for the null geodesics of Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes with scalar perturbations in the longitudinal gauge. From these we provide a rigorous derivation of the cosmological lens equation,…
Textures are topologically nontrivial field configurations which can exist in a field theory in which a global symmetry group $G$ is broken to a subgroup $H$, if the third homotopy group $\p3$ of $G/H$ is nontrivial. We compute this group…
We present a generalization and refinement of the Sachs-Wolfe technique which unifies many of the approaches taken to date and clarifies both the physical and the mathematical character of the method. We illustrate the formalism with a…
We study the behavior of light rays in perturbed Robertson-Walker cosmologies, calculating the redshift between an observer and the surface of last scattering to second order in the metric perturbation. At first order we recover the classic…
We obtain analytic formulae for the null geodesics of Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes with scalar perturbations in the longitudinal gauge. We use these to provide a rigorous derivation of the cosmological lens equation.…