Related papers: Is dark energy an effect of averaging?
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
Observational evidence indicating that the expansion of the universe is accelerating has surprised cosmologists in recent years. Cosmological models have sought to explain this acceleration by incorporating `dark energy', of which the…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
Dark energy is an elusive concept, which has been introduced two decades ago in order to make the acceleration of the universe a comprehensible phenomenon. However, the nature of this energy is far from being understood, both from a…
The cosmological concordance model contains two separate constituents which interact only gravitationally with themselves and everything else, the dark matter and the dark energy. In the standard dark energy models, the dark matter makes up…
The fact that the energy densities of dark energy and matter are similar currently, known as the coincidence problem, is one of the main unsolved problems of cosmology. We present here a model in which a spatial curvature of the universe…
Dark energy in the universe is assumed to be vacuum energy. The energy-momentum of vacuum is described by a scale-dependent cosmological constant. The equations of motion imply for the density of matter (dust) the sum of the usual matter…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark…
Recent cosmological observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and has negative pressure. Several conceptual issues related to the modeling of this component (`dark energy'), which…
The standard model of cosmology assumes that the Universe can be described to hover around a homogeneous-isotropic solution of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This description needs (sometimes hidden) hypotheses that restrict the…
We discuss a model of the universe where dark energy is replaced by electrically-charged extremely-massive dark matter. The cosmological constant has a value of the same order as the mean matter density, consistent with observations, and is…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
We study how the determination of the Hubble constant from cosmological distance measures is affected by models of dark energy and vice versa. For this purpose, constraints on the Hubble constant and dark energy are investigated using the…
Observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and exerts negative pressure. Theoretical understanding of this component (`dark energy'), which is driving an accelerated expansion of…
Dark energy appears to be the dominant component of the physical Universe, yet there is no persuasive theoretical explanation for its existence or magnitude. The acceleration of the Universe is, along with dark matter, the observed…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Within the standard cosmological scenario the Universe is found to be filled by obscure components (dark matter and dark energy) for ~95% of its energy budget. In particular, almost all the matter content in the Universe is given by dark…
One of the principal discoveries in modern cosmology is that standard model particles (including baryons, leptons and photons) together comprise only 5% of the mass-energy budget of the Universe. The remaining 95% consists of dark energy…
This article looks at how inhomogeneous spacetime models may be significant for cosmology. First it looks at how the averaging process may affect large scale dynamics, with backreaction effects leading to effective contributions to the…