Related papers: B2FH, the Cosmic Microwave Background and Cosmolog…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is an abundant source of cosmological information. However, this information is encoded in non-trivial ways in a signal that is difficult to observe. The resulting challenges in extracting this…
The ten's of micro-Kelvin variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation across the sky encode a wealth of information about the Universe. The full-sky, high-resolution maps of the CMB that will be made in…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) radiation was a long-sought fossil of energetic processes associated with structure formation and chemical evolution since the Big Bang. The COBE Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) and Far…
Much recent work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has focussed on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and particularly on the recovery of cosmological parameters from acoustic peaks in the power spectrum. However,…
Various mechanisms have been suggested for the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs), and this thesis focuses on the standard mechanism based on the critical collapse of cosmological fluctuations. The underlying idea is that during…
In addition to its spectrum and temperature anisotropy, the 2.7K Cosmic Microwave Background is also expected to exhibit a low level of polarization. The spatial power spectrum of the polarization can provide details about the formation of…
Recent measurements of the cosmic X-ray and radio backgrounds (CXB/CRB, respectively) obtained with Chandra and ARCADE2 report signals in excess of those expected from known sources, suggesting the presence of a yet undiscovered population…
In this paper we discuss the properties of the quasi-steady state cosmological model (QSSC) developed in 1993 in its role as a cyclic model of the universe driven by a negative energy scalar field. We discuss the origin of such a scalar…
It is well established that between 380000 and 1 billion years after the Big Bang the Inter Galactic Medium (IGM) underwent a "phase transformation" from cold and fully neutral to warm (~10^4 K) and ionized. Whether this phase…
We combine detections of anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with observations of inhomogeneity in the large-scale distribution of galaxies to test the predictions of models of cosmological structure formation. This…
The ARCADE 2 collaboration has reported a significant excess in the isotropic radio background, whose homogeneity cannot be reconciled with clustered sources. This suggests a cosmological origin prior to structure formation. We investigate…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique probe of cosmological parameters and conditions. There is a connection between anisotropy in the CMB and the topology of the Universe. Adopting a universe with the topology of a 3-Torus, or…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
The cosmic microwave background provides an image of the Universe 0.4 million years after the big bang, when atomic hydrogen formed out of free electrons and protons. One of the primary goals of observational cosmology is to obtain…
Our motion through the Universe generates a dipole in the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and also in the angular distribution of sources. If the cosmological principle is valid, these two dipoles are…
The physics of the standard hot big bang cosmology ensures that the early Universe was a primordial nuclear reactor, synthesizing the light nuclides (D, 3He, 4He, and 7Li) in the first 20 minutes of its evolution. After an overview of…
Within the first 20 minutes of the evolution of the hot, dense, early Universe, astrophysically interesting abundances of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 were synthesized by the cosmic nuclear reactor. The primordial abundances…
We discuss the question to what degree the geometrical structure and the matter content of the universe at scales exceeding the present Hubble horizon is constrained by cosmological observations, in particular by measurements of the cosmic…
This article is a report of 25 years of Cosmic Microwave Background activities at INPE. Starting from balloon flights to measure the dipole anisotropy caused by the Earth's motion inside the CMB radiation field, whose radiometer was a…