Related papers: A critical value for dark energy
More than sixty years ago Zwicky made the case that the great clusters of galaxies are held together by the gravitational force of unseen (dark) matter. Today, the case is stronger and more precise: Dark, nonbaryonic matter accounts for 30%…
We revisit the observational constraints on spatial curvature following recent claims that the Planck data favour a closed Universe. We use a new and statistically powerful Planck likelihood to show that the Planck temperature and…
We were asked to debate the value of the cosmological mass-density parameter Omega. Is Omega_m=1 in accordance with the simplest model? Is Omega_m much smaller as indicated by some observations? There is conflicting evidence. We lay out the…
Keeping in mind the current picture of an accelerating and flat Universe, some specific dynamical models of the cosmological term $\Lambda$ have been selected for investigating the nature of dark energy. Connecting the free parameters of…
The CNOC redshift survey of galaxy clusters measures Omega_M from Omega_e(z)= M/L x j/\rho_c which can be applied on a cluster-by-cluster basis. The mass-to-light ratios, M/L, are estimated from rich galaxy clusters, corrected to the field…
In this work we perform some studies related to dark energy. Firstly, we propose a dynamical approach to explain the dark energy content of the universe. We assume that a massless scalar field couples to the Hubble parameter with some…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. In this short review, we briefly summarize theories for the origin of cosmic acceleration and the observational methods being used to…
Some issues of the cosmological constant or dark energy are briefly reviewed. There are an increasing number of observations that constrain the equation of state of dark energy more stringently and favor the time-independent cosmological…
This short review was prepared as an introduction to the Royal Society's 'Dark Matter' conference. It addresses the embarrassing fact that 95% of the universe is unaccounted for. Favoured dark matter candidates are axions or…
Entropy bounds render quantum corrections to the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ finite. Under certain assumptions, the natural value of $\Lambda$ is of order the observed dark energy density $\sim 10^{-10} {\rm eV}^4$, thereby resolving…
We constrain f_nu = Omega_nu / Omega_m, the fractional contribution of neutrinos to the total mass density in the Universe, by comparing the power spectrum of fluctuations derived from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey with power spectra for…
In axion quintessence, the cosmological era with an energy contrast in dark energy 0.1 < Omega_DE < 0.9 may represent a significant fraction of the universe's lifetime if the minimum of the axion potential is negative (unstable axion…
The case for a flat Cold Dark Matter model with a positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$ has been recently strongly advocated by some theoreticians. In this paper we give the observers point of view to the light of the most recent…
We use the newly released 182 Type Ia supernova data combined with the third-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropic Probe data (WMAP3) and large scale structure (LSS) information including SDSS and 2dFGRS to constrain the dark energy equation…
Recent cosmological observations strongly suggest that the universe is dominated by an unknown form of energy with negative pressure. Why is this dark energy density of order the critical density today? We propose that the dark energy has…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly from the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and indirectly, from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. Dark energy contributes about 2/3 of the…
A possible connection between the energy W of the vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields and gravity in "empty space" is conjectured in this paper using a natural cutoff of high momenta with the help of the gravitational radius of the vacuum…
A cosmological constant, Lambda, is the most natural candidate to explain the origin of the dark energy (DE) component in the Universe. However, due to experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the DE could be evolving with…
Recent cosmic microwave background measurements combined with recent supernovae limits and other observational data have ambushed Omega_lambda and Omega_m. These cosmological culprits are trapped in a small pocket of parameter space:…
A cosmological model with total density close to critical (and flat geometry), dominated by dark matter and dark energy of unknown nature, and consistent with the basic predictions of the inflationary scenario is a very good fit to a…