Related papers: Broad Brush Cosmos
This contribution presents the cosmological models with extra dimensions that have been recently elaborated, which assume that ordinary matter is confined on a surface, called brane, embedded in a higher dimensional spacetime.
Cosmology is the dot com of the sciences. Boom or bust. It is about nothing less than the origin and evolution of the Universe, the all of everything. It is the boldest of enterprises and not for the fainthearted. Cosmologists are the…
An explicit full nulling scheme for cosmic shear observations is presented. It makes possible the construction of shear maps from extended source distributions for which the lens distance distribution is restricted to a definite interval.…
The new frontier of cosmology will be led by three-dimensional surveys of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Based on its all-sky surveys and redshift depth, the SKA is destined to revolutionize cosmology, in combination with future…
Conventional thinking says the universe is infinite. But it could be finite and relatively small, merely giving the illusion of a greater one, like a hall of mirrors. Recent astronomical measurements add support to a finite space with a…
Astronomy is the study of the Universe and all the objects that it comprises. Our attention is therefore usually focused beyond Earth, home to the only form of life known today. However, how can we continue to explore the secrets of the…
I review at the non-specialist level recent progress in the study of the large-scale structure of the Universe, covering the following areas: (1) Results from recently completed or ongoing redshift surveys of galaxies and X-ray clusters;…
The purpose of this paper is to survey the possible topologies of branching space-times, and, in particular, to refute the popular notion in the literature that a branching space-time requires a non-Hausdorff topology.
The long-awaited promise of studying high-redshift galaxies at long wavelengths has been partially eclipsed by progress at optical wavelengths, mostly because of the number of available pixels. It is nonetheless essential to study optically…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
The primary goal of Galactic archaeology is to learn about the origin of the Milky Way from the detailed chemistry and kinematics of millions of stars. Wide-field multi-fibre spectrographs are increasingly used to obtain spectral…
The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
The potential of cosmic shear to probe cosmology is well recognized and future optical wide field surveys are currently being designed to optimize the return of cosmic shear science. High precision cosmic shear analysis requires high…
We introduce Void Hierarchy as an important property of the Large--Scale Structure in the Universe and demonstrate how it can be used to interpret observations. Moreover the void hierarchy constraints any realistic galaxy and structure…
Whilst astronomy as a science is historically founded on observations at optical wavelengths, studying the Universe in other bands has yielded remarkable discoveries, from pulsars in the radio, signatures of the Big Bang at submm…
Gravitational lensing has become one of the most interesting tools to study the mass distribution in the Universe. Since gravitational light deflection is independent of the nature and state of the matter, it is ideally suited to…
The space-like hypersurface of the Universe at the present cosmological time is a three-dimensional manifold. A non-trivial global topology of this space-like hypersurface would imply that the apparently observable universe (the sphere of…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our universe appears to be…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…