Related papers: Cosmic Curvature Tested Directly from Observations
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
A fundamental property of an expanding universe is that any time dependent characteristic of distant objects must appear to scale by the factor $(1+z$). This is called time dilation. Light curves of type Ia supernovae and the duration of…
Recent observations of high redshift Supernovae at lower than expected value of the Hubble constant, widely interpreted as an evidence for accelerating expansion of the Universe, could alternatively be explained assuming a hyperbolic…
In order to test the expansion of the universe and its geometry, we carry out an Alcock & Paczynski cosmological test, that is, an evaluation of the ratio of observed angular size to radial/redshift size. The main advantage of this test is…
Within the cosmic screening approach, we obtain the exact formulas for the velocity-independent gravitational potentials produced by matter in the form of discrete sources distributed in the open and closed Universes. These formulas…
The cosmic spatial curvature parameter $\Omega_k$ is constrained, primarily by cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, to be very small. Observations of the cosmic distance ladder and the large scale structure can provide independent checks…
Breakthroughs in physics and astrophysics are often driven by technological advances, with the recent detection of gravitational waves being one such example. This white paper focuses upon how improved astrometric and spectroscopic…
We study the scalar curvature of spacelike hypersurfaces in the family of cosmological models known as generalized Robertson-Walker spacetimes, and give several rigidity results under appropriate mathematical and physical assumptions. On…
We use cosmography to present constraints on the kinematics of the Universe without postulating any underlying theoretical model a priori. To this end, we use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to perform comparisons to the supernova Ia…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy constrains the geometry of the Universe because the positions of the acoustic peaks of the angular power spectrum depend strongly on the curvature of underlying three-dimensional space. In…
We review observational tests for the homogeneity of the Universe on large scales. Redshift and peculiar velocity surveys, radio sources, the X-Ray Background, the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and the Cosmic Microwave Background are used to set…
The disagreement between low- and high-redshift measurements of the Hubble parameter is emerging as a serious challenge to the standard model of cosmology. We develop a covariant cosmographic analysis of the Hubble parameter in a general…
We propose a novel technique to probe the expansion history of the Universe based on the clustering statistics of cosmic voids. In particular, we compute their two-point statistics in redshift space on the basis of realistic mock galaxy…
A natural extension of the standard cosmological model are models that include curvature as a free parameter. In this work we study in detail the observational constraints on the non-flat $\Lambda CDM$ model using the two main geometric…
Supernovae are bright luminous stellar objects observable up to redshifts close to z~1. They are used to probe the geometry of the Universe and its expansion rate by applying different methods. In this article, I review various approaches…
Using the linear theory of perturbations in General Relativity, we express a set of consistency relations that can be observationally tested with current and future large scale structure surveys. We then outline a stringent…
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…
Several recent observations using standard rulers and standard candles now suggest, either individually or in combination, that the Universe is close to flat, i.e. that the curvature radius is about as large as the horizon radius (\sim…
Cosmic flexion, like cosmic shear, is a correlation function whose signal originates from the large-scale structure of the universe. Building on the observational success of cosmic shear, along with the unprecedented quality of large-scale…
For decades, H_0 and q_0 were the quest of cosmology, as they promised to characterize our "world model" without reference to a specific cosmological framework. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that q_0 cannot be directly measured…