Related papers: Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle…
The idea of a negative-pressure dark energy component in the Universe which causes an accelerated expansion in the late Universe has deep implications in models of field theory and general relativity. In this article, we survey the evidence…
It is shown that an accelerating expansion of the present-day Universe extracted from observed luminosity of the type Ia supernovae can be explained by quantum theory which takes into account feedback coupling between geometry and matter…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to the use of typical type Ia-Supernovae (hereafter SNIa) as standard candles to determine the energy density of the universe. Problems of principle for taking SNIa as…
The standard concordance model of the Universe is based on the cosmological constant as the driver of accelerating expansion. This concordance model is being subjected to a growing range of inter-locking observations. In addition to using…
We revisit a model-independent estimator for cosmic acceleration based on type Ia supernovae distance measurements. This approach does not rely on any specific theory for gravity, energy content or parameterization for the scale factor or…
The principles of General Relativity allow for a non-vanishing cosmological constant, which can possibly be interpreted at least partially in terms of quantum-fluctuations of matter fields. Depending on sign and magnitude it can cause…
The idea that we live near the centre of a large, nonlinear void has attracted attention recently as an alternative to dark energy or modified gravity. We show that an appropriate void profile can fit both the latest cosmic microwave…
Not much by themselves, aparently. We try to reconstruct the scale factor $a(t)$ of the universe from the SNe Ia data, i.e. the luminosity distance $d_{L}(z)$, using only the cosmological principle and the assumption that gravitation is…
The results from the Supernova Cosmology Project indicate a relation between cosmic distance and redshift that corresponds to an accelerating Universe, and, as a consequence, the presence of an energy component with negative pressure. This…
The discovery that we live in an accelerating universe changed drastically the paradigm of physics and introduced the concept of \textit{dark energy}. In this work, we present a brief historical description of the main events related to the…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly from the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and indirectly, from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. Dark energy contributes about 2/3 of the…
Keeping in mind the current picture of an accelerating and flat Universe, some specific dynamical models of the cosmological term $\Lambda$ have been selected for investigating the nature of dark energy. Connecting the free parameters of…
It has been only ~15 years since the discovery of dark energy (although some may argue there were strong indications even earlier). In the short time since measurements of type Ia supernovae indicated an accelerating universe, many other…
Two recent findings necessitate a closer look at the existing standard models of Particle Physics and Cosmology. These are the discovery of Neutrino oscillation, and hence a non zero mass on the one hand and, on the other, observations of…
Distant supernovae have been observed to be fainter than what is expected in a matter dominated universe. The most likely explanation is that the universe is dominated by an energy component with negative pressure -- dark energy. However,…
Measurements of the distances to SNe Ia have produced strong evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, implying the existence of a nearly uniform component of dark energy with negative pressure. We show that constraints…
Conservation of the phase-space density of photons plus Lorentz invariance requires that the cosmological luminosity distance be larger than the angular diameter distance by a factor of $(1+z)^2$, where $z$ is the redshift. Because this is…
Correctly interpreting observations of sources such as type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) require knowledge of the power spectrum of matter on AU scales - which is very hard to model accurately. Because under-dense regions account for much of the…
Type Ia supernovae have provided fundamental observational data in the discovery of the late acceleration of the expansion of the Universe in cosmology. However, this analysis has relied on the assumption of a Gaussian distribution for the…
Cosmological density fields are assumed to be translational and rotational invariant, avoiding any special point or direction, thus satisfying the Copernican Principle. A spatially inhomogeneous matter distribution can be compatible with…