Related papers: Real-time Cosmology with High Precision Spectrosco…
Cosmological measurements of the radiation density in the early universe can be used as a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model. Observations of primordial light element abundances have long been used to place non-trivial…
The cosmic microwave background temperature is a cornerstone astrophysical observable. Its present value is tightly constrained, but its redshift dependence, which can now be determined until redshift $z\sim6.34$, is also an important probe…
This is the dawning of the age of precision cosmology, when all the important parameters will be established to one significant figure or better, within the cosmological model. In the age of accurate cosmology the model, which nowadays…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
LISA might detect gravitational waves from mergers of massive black hole binaries strongly lensed by intervening galaxies (Sereno et al. 2010). The detection of multiple gravitational lensing events would provide a new tool for cosmography.…
In the past several decades, the standard cosmological model has been established and its parameters have been measured to a high precision, while there are still many of the fundamental questions in cosmology; such as the physics in the…
With the many ambitious proposals afoot for new generations of very large telescopes, along with spectrographs of unprecedented resolution, there arises the real possibility that the time evolution of the cosmological redshift may, in the…
I review the current status of cosmology as emerging from recent observations of cosmic microwave background anisotropies as well as from other sources of cosmological information.
Associated with the cosmic acceleration are the old and new cosmological constant problems, recently put into the more general context of the dark energy problem. In broad terms, the old problem is related to an unexpected order of…
Cosmological observations in the new millennium have dramatically increased our understanding of the Universe, but several fundamental questions remain unanswered. This topical group report describes the best opportunities to address these…
To test the theory of gravity one needs to test, on one hand, how space and time are distorted by matter and, on the other hand, how matter moves in a distorted space-time. Current observations provide tight constraints on the motion of…
A moderate investment of observing time with the International X-ray Observatory to study high-redshift galaxy clusters detected in future large-scale surveys, will provide cosmological measurements of fundamental importance. IXO…
The $\Lambda$-CDM model of cosmology has done much to clarify our picture of the early universe. However, there are still some questions that $\Lambda$-CDM does not necessarily answer; questions such as what is the fundamental nature of…
Modified gravity theories may provide an alternative to dark energy to explain cosmic acceleration. We argue that the observational program developed to test dark energy needs to be augmented to capture new tests of gravity on astrophysical…
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…
Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. In this short review, we briefly summarize theories for the origin of cosmic acceleration and the observational methods being used to…
With WMAP putting the phenomenological standard model of cosmology on a strong footing, one can look forward to mining the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for fundamental physics with higher sensitivity and on smaller scales. Future CMB…
Weak gravitational lensing, the deflection of light by mass, is one of the best tools to constrain the growth of cosmic structure with time and reveal the nature of dark energy. I discuss the sources of systematic uncertainty in weak…