Related papers: The Road to Precision Cosmology
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
These lectures describe how the Standard Model of cosmology ($\Lambda$CDM) has developped, based on observational facts but also on ideas formed in the context of the theory of fundamental interactions, both gravitational and…
We review a cosmology in which particles are fluctuationally created from a background Zero Point Field. This cosmology is consistent with recent observations of an ever expanding and accelerating universe, as also the recently confirmed…
Cosmology is very exciting for three reasons. There is a very successful standard model - the hot big bang - which describes the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec onward. There are bold ideas, foremost among them are inflation and…
For a few years now, cosmology has a standard model. By this term, we mean a consistent theoretical background which is at the same time simple and broad enough to offer coherent explanations for the vast majority of cosmological phenomena.…
Widening cracks are appearing in the $\Lambda$CDM model and it is becoming increasingly clear that the standard cosmological model struggles to describe the full expansion history of the Universe as revealed by the Cosmic Microwave…
Have we converged on the definitive model of cosmology? I present a critical assessment of the current paradigms for the evolution of large-scale structure.
Over the last 20 years, supernovae have become a key tool to constrain the expansion history of the Universe through the construction of Hubble diagrams, using luminosity distances to supernovae belonging to the "Ia" subtype. This technique…
The status of the standard cosmological model, also known as "LCDM" is described. With some simple assumptions, this model fits a wide range of data, with just six (or seven) free parameters. One should be skeptical about this claim, since…
The detection of the accelerated expansion of the Universe has been one of the major breakthroughs in modern cosmology. Several cosmological probes (CMB, SNe Ia, BAO) have been studied in depth to better understand the nature of the…
Simulations of large-scale structure in the universe have played a vital role in observational cosmology since 1980's in particular. Their important role will definitely continue to be true in the 21st century. Rather the requirements for…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
The current accelerated expansion of the universe has been one of the most important fields in physics and astronomy since 1998. Many cosmological models have been proposed in the literature to explain this mysterious phenomenon. Since the…
Observational cosmology is on the verge of new discoveries that will change the essence of our world-view. The matter concerns origin of initial conditions and physics of dark matter.
Model-independent methods in cosmology has become an essential tool in order to deal with an increasing number of theoretical alternatives for explaining the late-time acceleration of the Universe. In principle, this provides a way of…
Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…
Cosmography represents an important branch of cosmology which aims to describe the universe without the need of postulating \emph{a priori} any particular cosmological model. All quantities of interest are expanded as a Taylor series around…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
Cosmic structure simulations have improved enormously over the past decade, both in terms of the resolution which can be achieved, and with the addition of hydrodynamic and other techniques to formerly purely gravitational methods. This is…