Related papers: A Test of the Copernican Principle
The discrepancy between the Hubble parameter inferred from local measurements and that from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has motivated careful scrutiny of the assumptions that enter both analyses. Here we point out that the…
The apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe is forcing us to examine the foundational aspects of the standard model of cosmology -- in particular, the fact that dark energy is a direct consequence of the homogeneity assumption. We…
In the near future, observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies will provide accurate determinations of many fundamental cosmological parameters. In this paper, we analyse degeneracies among cosmological parameters to…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
We perform detailed calculations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in a CDM-dominated open universe with primordial adiabatic density perturbations for a variety of reionization histories. We show that to a great extent, the…
Cosmic Microwave Background experiments must achieve very accurate calibration of their polarization reference frame to avoid biasing the cosmological parameters. In particular, a wrong or inaccurate calibration might mimic the presence of…
The standard model of cosmology, {\Lambda}CDM, is the simplest model that matches the current observations, but it relies on two hypothetical components, to wit, dark matter and dark energy. Future galaxy surveys and cosmic microwave…
Certain modified gravity theories predict the existence of an additional, non-conformally coupled scalar field. A disformal coupling of the field to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is shown to affect the evolution of the energy…
Cosmological measurements over the next decade will enable us to shed light on the content and evolution of the Universe. Complementary measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are expected to…
The power spectrum is obtained for the Kolmogorov stochasticity parameter map for WMAP's cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation temperature datasets. The interest for CMB Kolmogorov map is that it can carry direct information about…
Light thermal relics of the hot big bang, often quantified by the parameter $N_\mathrm{eff}$, are one of the primary targets of cosmological measurements. At present, the energy density in such relics is constrained to be less than ten…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background represent a remarkable source of information for modern cosmology. Besides providing impressive support for the Big Bang model itself, they quantify the overall framework, or background, for…
Rapid progress has been made in observations of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These observations have enabled cosmologists to characterize the state of the universe at recombination, and…
Cosmic microwave background lensing has become a new cosmological probe, carrying rich information on the matter power spectrum and distances over the redshift range $z\approx1$-4. We investigate the role of scale dependent new physics,…
We review observational tests for the homogeneity of the Universe on large scales. Redshift and peculiar velocity surveys, radio sources, the X-Ray Background, the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and the Cosmic Microwave Background are used to set…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum is a near-perfect blackbody. The standard model of cosmology predicts small spectral distortions to this form, but no such distortion of the sky-averaged CMB spectrum has yet been…
There has been considerable interest in recent years in cosmological models in which we inhabit a very large, underdense void as an alternative to dark energy. A longstanding objection to this proposal is that observations limit our…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) comprises the oldest photons in the universe and is arguably our most direct cosmological observable. All precise and accurate measurements of its attributes serve to distinguish between cosmological…
The damping of primordial perturbations at small scales gives rise to distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Here, the dependence of the distortion on the different types of cosmological initial conditions is explored,…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectrum derived from the first year WMAP data demonstrates an intriguing lack of power at large scales that cannot be accounted for within the framework of the standard cosmological model. We…