Related papers: Glimpses into the early Universe
Dwarf galaxies provide opportunities for drawing inferences about the processes in the early universe by observing our "cosmological backyard"-the Local Group and its vicinity. This special issue of the open-access journal Advances in…
An approach to modelling the universe based on the requisites of gravitational energy. This model is explained as it relates to the stages of the universal life cycle and the continued existence of the universe as it is known today. The…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
The galactic evolutionary theory is now sufficiently mature to provide information about the galaxy formation phase. From evolutionary models we establish a link between the present features of late type galaxies and the protogalactic…
Loop quantum cosmology applies techniques derived for a background independent quantization of general relativity to cosmological situations and draws conclusions for the very early universe. Direct implications for the singularity problem…
Recent cosmic microwave background data in temperature and polarization have reached high precision in estimating all the parameters that describe the current so-called standard cosmological model. Recent results about the integrated…
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…
Production of high-energy gravitational objects is a common feature of gravitational theories. The primordial universe is a natural setting for the creation of black holes and other nonperturbative gravitational entities. Cosmic black holes…
The state of our understanding of cosmology is reviewed from an astrophysical cosmologist point of view with a particular emphasis given to recent observations and their impact. Discussion is then presented on the implications for particle…
The recent high-quality measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies have presented cosmologists with the possibility of studying the large scale properties of our universe with unprecedented precision. Here I review the…
The Standard Model of Particle Physics has been verified to unprecedented precision in the last few decades. However there are still phenomena in nature which cannot be explained, and as such new theories will be required. Since terrestrial…
A new and powerful probe of the origin and evolution of structures in the Universe has emerged and been actively developed over the last decade. In the coming decade, non-Gaussianity, i.e., the study of non-Gaussian contributions to the…
Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…
The understanding of the physical processes that lead to the origin of matter in the early Universe, creating both an excess of matter over anti-matter that survived until the present and a dark matter component, is one of the most…
The observable universe is fundamentally inhomogeneous and anisotropic. Quantum description of the generation of these inhomogeneities and anisotropies is ill-understood and unsatisfactory. After providing a brief account of the standard…
I review two different connections between particle theory and early-Universe cosmology: (1) Cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) tests of inflation and (2) particle dark matter. The inflationary predictions of a flat Universe and a nearly…
Cosmological inflation is not the only early universe scenario consistent with current observational data. I will discuss the criteria for a successful early universe cosmology, compare a couple of the proposed scenarios (inflation,…
The theory of cosmological fluctuations assumes that the pre-inflationary state of the universe was the quantum vacuum of a scalar field(s) coupled to gravity. The observed cosmic microwave background fluctuations are then interpreted as…
We argue that it is a fluctuational underpinning of the Quantum vacuum which on the one hand gives a stochastic character to the conservation laws, and on the other is required for explaining the recently observed acceleration of the…
According to the inflationary scenario of cosmology, all structure in the Universe can be traced back to primordial fluctuations during an accelerated (inflationary) phase of the very early Universe. A conceptual problem arises due to the…