Related papers: Colloquium: The Cosmic Dipole Anomaly
The question of whether the Universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales is of fundamental importance to cosmology, but has not yet been answered decisively. Surprisingly, neither an isotropic primary CMB nor…
The most fundamental premise to the standard model of the universe, the Cosmological Principle (CP), states that the large-scale properties of the universe are the same in all directions and at all comoving positions. Demonstrating this…
While the standard, six-parameter, spatially flat $\Lambda$CDM model has been highly successful, certain anomalies in the cosmic microwave background bring out a tension between this model and observations. The statistical significance of…
The conventional $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model supplemented by the inflation concept describes the Universe very well. However, there are still a few concerns: new Planck data impose constraints on the shape of the inflaton potential,…
Usually, we assume that there is no inhomogeneity isotropic in terms of our location in our uni- verse. This assumption has not been observationally confirmed yet in sufficient accuracy, and we need to consider the possibility that there…
The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are computed for the half-turn space E_2 which represents a compact flat model of the Universe, i.e. one with finite volume. This model is inhomogeneous in the sense that the…
The cosmological principle, as the cornerstone of the standard cosmological model, requires that the Universe be homogeneous and isotropic on large scales. As a fundamental assumption, it is constantly subjected to testing via various…
A recently proposed Asymptotically Safe cosmology provides an elegant mechanism towards understanding the nature of dark energy and its associated cosmic coincidence problem. The underlying idea is that the accelerated expansion of the…
Several anomalies appear to be present in the large-angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy maps of WMAP, including the alignment of large-scale multipoles. Models in which isotropy is spontaneously broken (e.g., by a scalar…
The Cosmological Principle is part of the foundation that underpins the standard model of the Universe. In the era of precision cosmology, when stress tests of the standard model are uncovering various tensions and possible anomalies, it is…
Cosmological density fields are assumed to be translational and rotational invariant, avoiding any special point or direction, thus satisfying the Copernican Principle. A spatially inhomogeneous matter distribution can be compatible with…
We propose a cosmological model that describes isotropic expansion of inhomogeneous universe. The energy-momentum tensor that creates the spatial inhomogeneity may not affect the uniform expansion scaling factor $a(t)$ in the FLRW-like…
This paper presents an analysis of the smoothness problem in cosmology by focussing on the ambiguities originated in the simplifying hypotheses aimed at observationally verifying if the large-scale distribution of galaxies is homogeneous,…
We investigate anisotropic fluid cosmology in a situation where the spacetime metric back-reacts in a local, time-dependent way to the presence of inhomogeneities. We derive exact solutions to the Einstein field equations describing…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion has been discovered as a consequence of redshift Supernovae data. In the usual way, this cosmic acceleration is explained by the presence of a positive cosmological constant or quantum vacuum energy,…
The standard cosmological model, which assumes statistical isotropy and parity invariance, predicts the absence of correlations between even-parity and odd-parity observables of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Contrary to these…
A local void in the globally Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmological model with the critical density ($\Omega_{0}=1$) is studied. The inhomogeneity is described using a Lema\^{\i}tre-Tolman-Bondi solution for a spherically symmetric…
We investigate possible astronomical manifestations of space-time anisotropy. The homogeneous vacuum Kasner solution was chosen as a reference anisotropic cosmological model because there are no effects caused by inhomogeneity in this…
This paper explores models of the FLRW universe that incorporate a time-varying cosmological term $\Lambda(t)$. Specifically, we assume a power-law form for the cosmological term as a function of the scale factor: $\Lambda(t)=\Lambda_{0}…
Cosmological parameters are constrained by a wide variety of observations. We examine the concordance diagram for modern measurements of the Hubble constant, the shape parameter from large scale structure, the cluster baryon fraction, and…