Related papers: Cosmological Implications of Trace-Charged Dark Ma…
The statistics of black holes and their masses strongly suggests that their mass distribution has a cutoff towards lower masses near $3 \times 10^{6}$ M$_{\odot}$. This is consistent with a classical formation mechanism from the…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
The traditional "explanation" for the observed acceleration of the universe is the existence of a positive cosmological constant. However, this can hardly be a truly convincing explanation, as an expanding universe is not expected to have a…
The nonbaryonic dark matter of the Universe is assumed to consist of new stable particles. A specific case is possible, when new stable particles bear ordinary electric charge and bind in heavy "atoms" by ordinary Coulomb interaction. Such…
In this essay we explore analogies between macroscopic patterns, which result from a sequence of phase transitions/instabilities starting from a homogeneous state, and similar phenomena in cosmology, where a sequence of phase transitions in…
Repulsive interactions between neutrons in compact stellar cores cause luminosity and a steady outflow of hydrogen from stellar surfaces. Neutron repulsion in more massive compact objects made by gravitational collapse produces violent,…
There is something unknown in the cosmos. Something big. Which causes the acceleration of the Universe expansion, that is perhaps the most surprising and unexpected discovery of the last decades, and thus represents one of the most pressing…
We study inflation in a recently proposed gravitational effective field theory describing the trace anomaly. The theory requires an additional scalar which is massless in the early universe. This scalar -- referenced as an anomalyon --…
We investigate the characteristic modifications in the evolving cosmological perturbations when dark energy interacts with dust-like matter, causing the latter's background energy density fall off with time faster than usual. Focusing in…
Attractor solutions that give dynamical reasons for dark energy to act like the cosmological constant, or behavior close to it, are interesting possibilities to explain cosmic acceleration. Coupling the scalar field to matter or to gravity…
Direct detection of light dark matter can be significantly enhanced by up-scattering of dark matter with energetic particles in the cosmic ambient. This boosted dark matter flux can reach kinetic energies up to tens of MeV, while the…
With mass ratio larger than $\sim 5$ (which depends on the black hole spin and the star radius), star disruption is not expected for a black hole merging with a neutron star during the final plunge phase. In the late inspiral stage, the…
The unexpected discovery of the accelerated cosmic expansion in 1998 has filled the Universe with the embarrassing presence of an unidentified "dark energy", or cosmological constant, devoid of any physical meaning. While this standard…
The positron fraction in cosmic rays was found to be steadily increasing in function of energy, above $\sim$10 GeV. This behaviour contradicts standard astrophysical mechanisms, in which positrons are secondary particles, produced in the…
Recent cosmological and astrophysical observations point out that the Universe is in accelerating expansion and filled up with non-luminous matter. In order to explain the observed large scale structures and this accelerating behavior one…
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…
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…
While, to ensure successful cosmology, dark matter (DM) must kinematically decouple from the standard model plasma very early in the history of the Universe, it can remain coupled to a bath of "dark radiation" until a relatively late epoch.…
TeV-mass dark matter charged under a new GeV-scale gauge force can explain electronic cosmic-ray anomalies. We propose that the CoGeNT and DAMA direct detection experiments are observing scattering of light stable states -- "GeV-Matter" --…
Phenomena currently attributed to Dark Energy (DE) and Dark Matter (DM) are merely a result of the interplay between gravitational energy density, generated by the contraction of space by matter, and the energy density of the Cosmological…