Related papers: LCDM: Triumphs, Puzzles and Remedies
Scaling relations of galaxy clusters are a powerful probe of cosmic isotropy in the late Universe. Owing to their strong cosmological dependence, galaxy cluster scaling relations can obtain tight constraints on the spatial variation of…
WMAP and Planck may have uncovered several anomalies in the full CMB sky that could indicate possible new physics driving the growth of density fluctuations in the early Universe. These include an unusually low power at the largest scales…
We compare the statistics of parity even and odd multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky from PLANCK full mission temperature measurements. An excess power in odd multipoles compared to even multipoles has previously been…
The CMB anisotropies in spherical 3-spaces with a non-trivial topology are analysed with a focus on lens and prism shaped fundamental cells. The conjecture is tested that well proportioned spaces lead to a suppression of large-scale…
The standard cosmological model, now strongly constrained by direct observation at early epochs, is very successful in describing the structure of the evolved universe on large and intermediate scales. Unfortunately, serious contradictions…
Observational cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation. The transition to precision cosmology…
We review the recently found large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. These include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with each other and with geometry and direction…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
Galaxies and their dark-matter halos have posed several challenges to the Dark Energy plus Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) cosmological model. These discrepancies between observations and theory intensify for the lowest-mass (`dwarf') galaxies.…
We use the Millennium Simulation (MS) to study the statistics of LCDM halo concentrations at z = 0. Our results confirm that the average halo concentration declines monotonically with mass; a power-law fits well the concentration-mass…
Despite its continued observational successes, there is a persistent (and growing) interest in extending cosmology beyond the standard model, $\Lambda$CDM. This is motivated by a range of apparently serious theoretical issues, involving…
In the very last years, cosmological models where the properties of the dark components of the Universe - dark matter and dark energy - are accounted for by a single "dark fluid" have drawn increasing attention and interest. Amongst many…
In the last years with the increasing precision in cosmological observations we have been able to establish a standard model of cosmology, the so-called $\Lambda$CDM, but also find some tensions between cosmological probes that are…
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…
Many different techniques to analyze galaxy clustering data and obtain cosmological constraints have been proposed, tested and used. Given the large amount of data that will be available soon, it is worth investigating new observables and…
The inflation-inspired flat, cold dark matter-dominated models of structure formation with adiabatic, nearly scale-invariant initial conditions agree very well with current CMB anisotropy data. The success of these models is highlighted by…
We review, compare and extend recent studies searching for evidence for a preferred cosmological axis. We start from the Union2 SnIa dataset and use the hemisphere comparison method to search for a preferred axis in the data. We find that…
Given an arbitrary function, we may construct symmetric and antisymmetric functions under a certain operation. Since statistical isotropy and homogeneity of our Universe has been a fundamental assumption of modern cosmology, we do not…
The standard LambdaCDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality. It is incomplete, with open questions and anomalies, but the same is true of all our physical theories. The anomalies in the…
We study the $z=0$ properties of clusters (and large groups) of galaxies within the context of interacting and non-interacting quintessence cosmological models, using a series of adiabatic SPH simulations. Initially, we examine the average…