Related papers: Cosmic Mnemonics
The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which was dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009…
Questions such as whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental open problems that high precision modern cosmology needs to resolve. These questions go beyond the scope of…
In the last decade, the study of the overall shape of the universe, called Cosmic Topology, has become testable by astronomical observations, especially the data from the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) obtained by WMAP and…
The standard cosmological model, with its six independent parameters, successfully describes our observable Universe. One of these parameters, the optical depth to reionization $\tau_\mathrm{reio}$, represents the scatterings that Cosmic…
The assumption that a complete description of an early state of the universe does not privilege any position or direction in space leads to a unified account of probability in cosmology, macroscopic physics, and quantum mechanics. Such a…
The last years have been an exciting period for the field of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) research. With recent CMB balloon-borne and ground-based experiments we are entering a new era of 'precision' cosmology that enables us to…
We present a brief history of the construction of models of the universe, followed by calculations of quantitative characteristics of basic geometric and kinematic properties of the Standard Cosmological Model ($\Lambda$CDM). Using the…
In the context of the averaging problem in relativistic cosmology, we provide a key to the interpretation of cosmological parameters by taking into account the actual inhomogeneous geometry of the Universe. We discuss the relation between…
The Universe is the grandest conceivable scale on which the human mind can strive to understand nature. The amazing aspect of cosmology, the branch of science that attempts to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe, is that it…
There is a deep cosmological mystery: although dependent on very different underlying physics, the timescales of structure formation, of galaxy cooling (both radiatively and against the CMB), and of vacuum domination do not differ by many…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) offers a unique window into the early universe, providing insights into cosmological parameters like the Hubble constant. Recent precise measurements of the CMB by experiments like Planck seem to point…
In the past decade, observational cosmology has had one of the most exciting periods in the past century. The precision with which we have been able to measure cosmological parameters has increased tremendously, while at the same time, we…
We study the impact of assumptions made about the neutrino mass ordering on cosmological parameter estimation with the purpose of understanding whether in the future it will be possible to infer the specific neutrino mass distribution from…
I review the present status of the Cosmic Microwave Background, with some emphasis on the current and future implications for particle physics. Conclusions are: gravitational instability in a dark matter dominated universe grew today's…
The Planck satellite is expected to improve the measurement of most cosmological parameters by several factors with respect to current WMAP results. The actual performance may depend upon various aspects of the data analysis. In this paper…
Recent estimates of cosmological parameters derived from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies are based on the assumption that we know the precise amount of energy density in relativistic particles in the universe, $\omega_{rel}$,…
We investigate the dependence of cosmological parameters on the number count of peaks (local maxima and minima) in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky. The peak statistics contains the whole information of acoustic oscillations in the…
The discussion of cosmological parameters used to be a source of embarrassment to cosmologists. Today, measurements of the cosmological parameters are leading the way into the era of precision cosmology. The CMB temperature is measured to…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
We present a collection of new, open-source computational tools for numerically modeling recent large-scale observational data sets using modern cosmology theory. Specifically, these tools will allow both students and researchers to…