Related papers: Peculiar acceleration
The observed late-time acceleration of the cosmic expansion constitutes a fundamental problem in modern theoretical physics and cosmology. In an attempt to weight the validity of a large number of dark energy models, I use the recent…
Analyses of peculiar velocity surveys face several challenges, including low signal--to--noise in individual velocity measurements and the presence of small--scale, nonlinear flows. I will present three new analyses that attempt to address…
The cosmic acceleration is one of the most significant cosmological discoveries over the last century. The two categories of explanation are exotic component (dark energy) and modified gravity. We constrain the two types of model by a joint…
To evaluate a potential usually one analyzes trajectories of test particles. For the Galactic Center case astronomers use bright stars or photons, so there are two basic observational techniques to investigate a gravitational potential,…
I review progress in the past few years in studying the large-scale structure of the universe through redshift surveys of galaxies. Of the many statistical methods used to describe the galaxy distribution, I concentrate here on the power…
Galaxy mergers lead to the formation of massive black hole binaries which can accelerate background stars close to the speed of light. We estimate the comoving density of ejected stars with a peculiar velocity in excess of $0.1c$ or $0.5c$…
We consider the linear kinematics of large-scale peculiar motions in a perturbed Friedmann universe. In so doing, we take the viewpoint of the "real" observers that move along with the peculiar flow, relative to the smooth Hubble expansion.…
We examine astronomical observations that would be achievable over a future timeline corresponding to the documented history of human civilization so far, $\sim 10^4$ years. We examine implications for measurements of the redshift drift,…
In recent years, significant progress has been made in building new galaxy clusters samples, at low and high redshifts, from wide-area surveys, particularly exploiting the Sunyaev--Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. A large effort is underway to…
Peculiar velocities are analyzed through cosmological perturbations in the Newtonian longitudinal gauge characterized by irrotational shear-free congruences in an Eulerian frame. We show that non-trivial peculiar velocity fields can be…
Observations of distant supernovae indicate that the Universe is now in a phase of accelerated expansion the physical cause of which is a mystery. Formally, this requires the inclusion of a term acting as a negative pressure in the…
Cosmic acceleration may be the result of unknown physical processes involving either new fields in high energy physics or modifications of gravitation theory. In the latter case, such modifications are usually related to the existence of…
I study seven novel observational tests of general relativity. First, I show that a gravitational wave pulse from a major merger of massive black holes at the Galactic center induces a permanent increase in the Earth-Moon separation.…
The flyby anomaly is a persistent riddle in astrodynamics. Orbital analysis in several flybys of the Earth since the Galileo spacecraft flyby of the Earth in 1990 have shown that the asymptotic post-encounter velocity exhibits a difference…
In an undulant universe, cosmic expansion is characterized by alternating periods of acceleration and deceleration. We examine cosmologies in which the dark-energy equation of state varies periodically with the number of e-foldings of the…
The low-redshift velocity field is a unique probe of the growth of cosmic structure and gravity. We propose to use distances from gravitational wave (GW) detections, in conjunction with the redshifts of their host galaxies from wide field…
Observational manifestations of some models of modified gravity, which have been suggested to explain the accelerated cosmological expansion, are analyzed for gravitating systems with time dependent mass density. It is shown that if the…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration has presented a unique challenge for cosmologists. As observational cosmology forges ahead, theorists have struggled to make sense of a standard model that requires extreme fine tuning. This challenge is…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…
We perform a principal component analysis to assess ability of future observations to measure departures from General Relativity in predictions of the Poisson and anisotropy equations on linear scales. In particular, we focus on how the…