Related papers: Cold dark matter heats up
We know from cosmological and astrophysical observations that more than 80% of the matter density in the Universe is non-luminous, or dark. This non-baryonic dark matter could be composed of neutral, heavy particles, which were…
Dark matter (DM) is predicted to be the dominant mass component in galaxies. In the central region of Early-type galaxies it is expected to account for a large amount of the total mass, although the stellar mass should still represent the…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Motivated by results implying that the constituents of dark matter (DM) might be collisional, we consider a cosmological (toy-) model, in which the DM itself possesses some sort of thermodynamic properties. In this case, not only can the…
Despite the fact that the mean matter density of the universe has been measured to an accuracy of a few percent within the standard $\Lambda$CDM paradigm, its median density is not known even to order of magnitude. Typical points lie in…
[A brief review intended for a general physics colloquium audience.] Astrophysicists now know that 80% of the matter in the universe is `dark matter', composed of neutral and weakly interacting elementary particles that are not part of the…
The standard $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology is formulated as a simple modified gravity coupled to a single scalar field ("darkon") possessing a non-trivial hidden nonlinear Noether symmetry. The main ingredient in the construction is the…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
The most luminous galaxies in the present Universe are found at the centers of the most massive dark matter haloes, rich galaxy clusters. In the LCDM cosmology, such massive halo cores are present at redshift z=6 with a comoving number…
We explore an extended cosmological scenario where the dark matter is an admixture of cold and additional non-cold species. The mass and temperature of the non-cold dark matter particles are extracted from a number of cosmological…
Cosmological models involving an interaction between dark matter and dark energy have been proposed in order to solve the so-called coincidence problem. Different forms of coupling have been studied, but there have been claims that…
We discuss physical interpretation of {\Lambda}CDM cosmology from a Machian model of the universe containing nothing but visible matter (ordinary matter, radiation). The Friedmann equation can be derived from a Machian definition of energy,…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
The high-quality cosmological data, which became available in the last decade, have thrusted upon us a rather preposterous composition for the universe which poses one of the greatest challenges theoretical physics has ever faced: the…
Observations show that about the 20% of the Universe is composed by invisible (dark) matter (DM), for which many candidates have been proposed. In particular, the anomalous behavior of rotational curves of galaxies (i.e. the flattening at…
A huge amount of good quality data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing the today observed phase of accelerated expansion. This new observational trend is commonly addressed as Precision Cosmology. Despite…
In our current cosmological model, the main constituents of the Universe are dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is unknown, and for which there is no place in the standard model of particle physics. How to include dark matter and…
A new concept of generation of the cosmological baryon excess along with the cold dark matter (CDM) in the Universe is proposed and corresponding scenarios are outlined. Possible realizations of the idea in the framework of supersymmetric…
We examine the cosmology of warm dark matter (WDM), both stable and decaying, from the point of view of structure formation. We compare the matter power spectrum associated to WDM masses of 1.5 keV and 0.158 keV, with that expected for the…
Phenomena currently attributed to Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE) are merely a result of the interplay between gravitational energy density, caused by the contraction of space by matter, and space dilation, caused by the energy…