Related papers: Geodesic completeness and homogeneity condition fo…
The existence of black holes in the Universe is nowadays established on the grounds of a blench of astrophysical observations, most notably those of gravitational waves from binary mergers and the imaging of supermassive objects at the…
New nondiagonal $G_{2}$ inhomogeneous cosmological solutions are presented in a wide range of scalar-tensor theories with a stiff perfect fluid as a matter source. The solutions have no big-bang singularity or any other curvature…
The inflationary paradigm has transformed our understanding of the early universe; yet most inflationary models are considered geodesically past-incomplete, suggesting a beginning of time or a primordial Big Bang singularity. The…
Singularity theorems of general relativity utilize the notion of causal geodesic incompleteness as a criterion of the presence of a spacetime singularity. The incompleteness of a causal curve implies the end and/or beginning of the…
Cosmological inflation is discussed in the framework of $F(R,{\cal G})$ gravity where $F$ is a generic function of the curvature scalar $R$ and the Gauss-Bonnet topological invariant $\cal G$. The main feature that emerges in this analysis…
We show that a general solution of the Einstein equations that describes approach to an inhomogeneous and anisotropic sudden spacetime singularity does not experience geodesic incompleteness. This generalises the result established for…
Two theorems related to gravitational time delay are proven. Both theorems apply to spacetimes satisfying the null energy condition and the null generic condition. The first theorem states that if the spacetime is null geodesically…
In the context of inflationary models with a pre-inflationary stage, in which the Einstein equations are obeyed, the weak energy condition is satisfied, and spacetime topology is trivial, we argue that homogeneity on super-Hubble scales…
The problem of a rigorous theory of singularities in space-times with torsion is addressed. We define geodesics as curves whose tangent vector moves by parallel transport. This is different from what other authors have done, because their…
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 present an up to cubic curvature correction to General Relativity with the following features: (i) its vacuum spectrum solely consists of a graviton and is ghost-free, (ii) it possesses well-behaved black hole solutions which coincide…
We demonstrate a non-inflationary solution to the cosmological horizon problem in scenarios in which our observable universe is confined to three spatial dimensions (a three-brane) embedded in a higher dimensional space. A signal traveling…
As we now know, there are indeed at least two major difficulties with General Relativity (GR). The first one is related with its incompatibility with quantum mechanics, in the absence of a widely accepted consistent theory that combines the…
We investigate anisotropic and homogeneous cosmological models in the scalar-tensor theory of gravity with non-minimal kinetic coupling of a scalar field to the curvature given by the function $\eta\cdot(\phi/2)\cdot G_{\mu\nu}\,\nabla^\mu…
In this paper we investigate the cosmological dynamics of an up to cubic curvature correction to General Relativity (GR) known as Cosmological Einsteinian Cubic Gravity (CECG), whose vacuum spectrum consists of the graviton exclusively and…
We present a novel solution to the cosmological constant (CC) problem that requires no fine-tunings nor anthropic reasoning. In pre-geometric gravity (PGG), spacetime emerges from the spontaneous breaking of a fundamental gauge symmetry.…
In this talk we shall show a perfect fluid cosmological model and its properties. The model possesses an orthogonally transitive abelian two-dimensional group of isometries that corresponds to cylindrical symmetry. The matter content is a…
We point out that the horizon problem encountered in standard text-books or review papers on cosmology is, in general, derived for world models based on Robertson-Walker line element where homogeneity and isotropy of the universe -- \`a la…
In this chapter we review the recent developments of realizing $R^2$-like inflation in the framework of a most general UV nonlocal extension of Einstein's general theory of relativity (GR). It is a well-motivated robust approach towards…
Black hole solutions are studied here within the symmetric teleparallel formulation of gravity, employing the $f(Q)$ model in which the gravitational dynamics are governed by the non-metricity scalar $Q$. We focus on static, circularly…