Related papers: The Big Bang Was Not That Bright
After inflation the Universe presumably undergoes a phase of reheating which in effect starts the thermal big bang cosmology. However, so far we have very little direct experimental or observational evidence of this important phase of the…
Big-Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) represents one of the earliest phenomena that can lead to observational constraints on the early Universe properties. It is well-known that many important mechanisms and phase transitions occurred before BBN.…
Hawking radiation from a non-extremal black hole is known to be approximately Planckian. The thermal spectrum receives multiple corrections including greybody factors and due to kinematical restrictions on the infrared and ultraviolet…
The first prediction of the existence of "relict radiation" or radiation remaining from the "Big Bang" was made in 1948. This derived from the seminal dissertation work of Ralph A. Alpher. He was a doctoral student of George A. Gamow and…
In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<137, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-373K (0-100 degrees Celsius), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be…
We address the emerging discrepancy between the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis data and standard cosmology, which asks for a bit longer evolution time. If this effect is real, one possible implication (in a framework of brane cosmology model) is…
The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we…
The universe would have been completely dark between the epoch of recombination and the development of the first non-linear structure. But at redshifts beyond 5 -- perhaps even beyond 20 -- stars formed within `subgalaxies' and created the…
It is quite possible that the reheat temperature of the universe is extremely low close to the scale of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, i.e. $T_{R}\sim 1-10$ MeV. At such low reheat temperatures generating matter anti-matter asymmetry and…
Models and simulations of the epoch of reionization predict that spectra of the 21-cm transition of atomic hydrogen will show a clear fluctuation peak, at a redshift and scale, respectively, that mark the central stage of reionization and…
The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal…
We present a model-independent reconstruction of the early expansion and thermal histories of the universe, obtained from light element abundance measurements. The expansion history is tightly constrained around the onset of the Big Bang…
Dark energy is one of the mysteries of modern science. It is unlike any known form of matter or energy and has been detected so far only by its gravitational effect of repulsion. Owing to its effects being discernible only at very very…
The standard model of cosmology assumes that our Universe began 14 Gyrs (billion years) ago from a singular Big Bang creation. This can explain a vast range of different astrophysical data from a handful of free cosmological parameters.…
About half a million years after the Big Bang, the ever-fading cosmic blackbody radiation cooled below 3000 K and shifted first into the infrared and then into the radio, and the smooth baryonic plasma that filled the Universe became…
Our universe is probably a huge black hole. If that is true, all the light and heat ejected by various celestial bodies into the space will be confined within it and shuttling ceaselessly, leading eventually to a uniform equilibrium…
We show how recent data from observations of the cosmic microwave background may suggest the presence of additional radiation density which appeared after big bang nucleosynthesis. We propose a general scheme by which this radiation could…
Light black holes could have formed in the very early universe through the collapse of large primordial density fluctuations. These primordial black holes (PBHs), if light enough, would have evaporated by now because of the emission of…
Prior to the epoch of full reionization, the intergalactic medium and gravitationally collapsed systems will be detectable in 21-cm radiation. Physical mechanisms that would produce a 21-cm signature are discussed. These include Lya…
In popular cold dark matter cosmological scenarios, stars may have first appeared in significant numbers around a redshift of 10 or so, as the gas within protogalactic halos with virial temperatures in excess of 20,000 K (corresponding to…