Related papers: Do stochastic inhomogeneities affect dark-energy p…
The current cosmological dark sector (dark matter plus dark energy) is challenging our comprehension about the physical processes taking place in the Universe. Recently, some authors tried to falsify the basic underlying assumptions of such…
Cosmic shear constrains cosmology by exploiting the apparent alignments of pairs of galaxies due to gravitational lensing by intervening mass clumps. However galaxies may become (intrinsically) aligned with each other, and with nearby mass…
Determining the equation of state of dark energy with astronomical observations is crucially important to understand the nature of dark energy. In performing a likelihood analysis of the data, especially of the cosmic microwave background…
The present standard model of cosmology states that the known particles carry only a tiny fraction of total mass and energy of the Universe. Rather, unknown dark matter and dark energy are the dominant contributions to the cosmic energy…
We examine the properties of a recently proposed observationally viable alternative to homogeneous cosmology with smooth dark energy, the timescape cosmology. In the timescape model cosmic acceleration is realized as an apparent effect…
We modify Einstein General Relativity by adding non-dynamical scalar fields to account simultaneously for both dark matter and dark energy. The dark energy in this case can be distributed in-homogeneously even within horizon scales. Its…
We discuss the two potentially important effects which should be taken into account in the analysis of the cosmological redshift-space distortion especially at high redshifts; the effect of inhomogeneities in the light propagation and the…
This thesis deals with the averaging problem in cosmology, which has gained considerable interest in recent years, and is concerned with correction terms (after averaging inhomogeneities) that appear in the Einstein equations when working…
The redshift dependence of the cosmic microwave background temperature, $T(z)=T_0(1+z)$, is a key prediction of standard cosmology, but this relation is violated in many extensions thereof. Current astrophysical facilities can probe it in…
Smoothing over structures in general relativity leads to a renormalisation of the background, and potentially many other effects which are poorly understood. Observables such as the distance-redshift relation when averaged on the sky do not…
We calculate the systematic inhomogeneity-induced correction to the cosmological constant that one would infer from an analysis of the luminosities and redshifts of Type Ia supernovae, assuming a homogeneous universe. The calculation…
Inhomogeneous cosmological models have had significant success in explaining cosmological observations without the need for dark energy. Generally, these models imply inhomogeneous matter distributions alter the observable relations that…
We study the power of upcoming weak lensing surveys to probe dark energy. Dark energy modifies the distance-redshift relation as well as the matter power spectrum, both of which affect the weak lensing convergence power spectrum. Some…
We combine recent measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies, Supernovae luminosity distances and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations to derive constraints on the dark energy equation of state w in the redshift range 0<z<2, using a…
It is commonly stated that we have entered the era of precision cosmology in which a number of important observations have reached a degree of precision, and a level of agreement with theory, that is comparable with many Earth-based physics…
We argue that there is an intrinsic noise on measurements of the equation of state parameter $w=p/\rho$ from large-scale structure around us. The presence of the large-scale structure leads to an ambiguity in the definition of the…
Using the exact Lemaitre-Bondi-Tolman solution with a non-vanishing cosmological constant $\Lambda$, we investigate how the presence of a local spherically-symmetric inhomogeneity can affect apparent cosmological observables, such as the…
Using a fully gauge-invariant approach, we compute for the first time in the literature relativistic effects on the redshift drift up to second order in cosmological perturbation theory. This is achieved by employing a set of light-cone…
General relativistic corrections to the galaxy power spectrum appearing at the horizon scale, if neglected, may induce biases on the measured values of the cosmological parameters. In this paper, we study the impact of general relativistic…
We investigate the effect that the average backreaction of structure formation has on the dynamics of the cosmological expansion, within the concordance model. Our approach in the Poisson gauge is fully consistent up to second-order in a…