Related papers: WFIRST: The Essential Cosmology Space Observatory …
We develop a cosmological theory in which the evolution of the universe is controlled by the cosmological constant and dominated by the associated vacuum energy. The universe starts as a classical de Sitter space with an infinite effective…
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…
One of the major goals of observational cosmology is to acquire empirical data that has the diagnostic power to develop the theoretical modelling of the high-redshift universe, ultimately leading to an accurate understanding of the…
The past decade began with the first light of ALMA and will end at the start of the new era of hyperdimensional astrophysics. Our community-wide movement toward highly multiwavelength and multidimensional datasets has enabled immense…
Cosmic acceleration is explained quantitatively, as an apparent effect due to gravitational energy differences that arise in the decoupling of bound systems from the global expansion of the universe. "Dark energy" is a misidentification of…
In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF), anticipating the no growth in funding, has commissioned a review of NSF-funded astronomy assets with the goal of determining how to best allocate funding for this decade. Inputs…
Astronomical observations from small galaxies to the largest scales in the universe can be consistently explained by the simple idea of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is however still unknown. Empirically it cannot be any of the…
We discuss some of the practical considerations that need to be made in the design of extra-galactic field surveys using FIRST. We investigate the various limitations that confusion noise imposes on possible FIRST surveys and the benefits…
We consider ever-expanding Big Bang models with a cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, and investigate in detail the evolution of the observable part of the universe. We also discuss quintessence models from the same point of view. A new…
The kinematics and dynamic interpretation of the cosmological expansion is reviewed in a widely accessible manner with emphasis on the acceleration aspect. Virtually all the approaches that can in principle account for the accelerated…
Far-infrared astronomy has advanced rapidly since its inception in the late 1950's, driven by a maturing technology base and an expanding community of researchers. This advancement has shown that observations at far-infrared wavelengths are…
A new speculative model for the expansion of our universe has been under development by the author for the last two decades, which correctly predicts astronomical measurements with no dark matter or dark energy. This new closed model (no…
The universe appears to be accelerating, but the reason why is a complete mystery. The simplest explanation, a small vacuum energy (cosmological constant), raises three difficult issues: why the vacuum energy is so small, why it is not…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
The next generation of gravitational-wave observatories can explore a wide range of fundamental physics phenomena throughout the history of the universe. These phenomena include access to the universe's binary black hole population…
One of the most favourable extensions of General Relativity is the $f(R)$ gravity. $f(R)$ gravity in Palatini formalism can be a realistic alternative to the dark energy problem. In this work we study a recently introduced dark energy…
In the last century, theoretical and experimental developments have established the General Relativity theory as the most successful theory for describing the gravitational phenomenon. On the other hand, in the last two decades, multiple…
Recent observations confirm that our universe is flat and consists of a dark energy component $\Omega_{DE}\simeq 0.7$. This dark energy is responsible for the cosmic acceleration as well as determines the feature of future evolution of the…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
The next generation of gravitational-wave detectors, conceived to begin operations in the 2030s, will probe fundamental physics with exquisite sensitivity. These observations will measure the equation of state of dense nuclear matter in the…