Related papers: Cosmology with Hypervelocity Stars
Due to the foreground extinction of the Milky Way, galaxies appear increasingly fainter the closer they lie to the Galactic Equator, creating a "zone of avoidance" of about 25% in the distribution of optically visible galaxies. A…
The main foundations of the standard $\Lambda $CDM model of cosmology are that: 1) The redshifts of the galaxies are due to the expansion of the Universe plus peculiar motions; 2) The cosmic microwave background radiation and its…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
Cosmology can be viewed as geodesic motion in an appropriate metric on an `augmented' target space; here we obtain these geodesics from an effective relativistic particle action. As an application, we find some exact (flat and curved)…
There has been remarkable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Largely due to a combination of deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging, Keck spectroscopy, and COBE far-IR background…
A randomly chosen star in today's Universe is most likely to live in a galaxy with a stellar mass between that of the Milky Way and Andromeda. Yet it remains uncertain how the structural evolution of these bulge-disk systems proceeded. Most…
Gravitational time delays, observed in strong lens systems where the variable background source is multiply-imaged by a massive galaxy in the foreground, provide direct measurements of cosmological distance that are very complementary to…
A summary of the current knowledge on hypervelocity stars (HVSs). HVSs are fascinating because their properties are linked to Sgr A* and the stellar environment of the Galactic Center. Observing the distribution of HVSs can address: 1) the…
New systematic classification of cosmological models of the present Universe is introduced. After making the comparison of these models with all existing observational data three viable models remain: the cold dark matter model with the…
Some remarkable examples of alternative cosmological theories are reviewed here, ranging from a compilation of variations on the Standard Model through the more distant quasi-steady-state cosmology, plasma cosmology, or universe models as a…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
This analysis considers our universe as a closed Friedmann universe, dominated by vacuum energy in the form of a cosmological constant, with cosmological parameters obtained from full mission Planck satellite observations. A few simple…
We study three processes that eject hypervelocity (>10^3 km/s) stars from the Galactic center: (i) close encounters of two single stars; (ii) tidal breakup of binary stars by the central black hole, as originally proposed by Hills; and…
The age of the Universe in the $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with $\Omega_{matter}=0.26$ and $\Omega_{\Lambda}=0.74$ is the same as in the Milne cosmology which correspods to an almost empty universe. In both cases it is a reciprocal Hubble…
We observe the past and present of the universe, but can we predict the far future? Observations suggest that in thousands of billions of years from now most matter and radiation will be absorbed by the cosmological horizon. As it absorbs…
Cosmic rays, along with stellar radiation and magnetic fields, are known to make up a significant fraction of the energy density of galaxies such as the Milky Way. When cosmic rays interact in the interstellar medium, they produce gamma-ray…
We ask if the conventional variable separation techniques in the studying of standard cosmology and the collapsing of extremely dense stars introduce Newton's absolute space-time concepts. If this is the case, then a completely relative…
Six challenges for the standard cosmological model $\Lambda$CDM are listed, which arise when comparing theoretical predictions with observational data on scales of ~1 Mpc. Different parameters of luminous and dwarf galaxies in the local…
Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…
A new varying-$c$ cosmological model constructed using two additional assumptions, which was introduced in our previous work, is briefly reviewed and the dynamic equation of the model is derived distinctly from a semi-Newtonian approach.…