Related papers: A Counterexample to Claimed COBE Constraints on Co…
In this talk, I review some recent work on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an open universe. I emphasize that the observed CMB anisotropies are still consistent with a low value of $\Omega$, and I address the question of…
Departures of the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from a perfect blackbody probe a fundamental property of the universe -- its thermal history. Current upper limits, dating back some 25 years, limit such spectral…
The COBE satellite has discovered anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) consistent with a scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations. As reviewed in this lecture, topological defect models of structure formation…
We challenge the widely held belief that the cosmological principle is an obvious consequence of the observed isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, combined with the Copernican principle. We perform a detailed analysis of a…
One still cannot conclusively assert that the universe underwent a neutral phase, despite the new COBE FIRAS limit y<0.000025 on Compton y-distortions of the cosmic microwave background. Although scenarios where the very early (z=1000)…
The universe is nearly isotropic on very large scales. It is much more difficult to show that the universe is radially homogeneous (independent of distance), or equivalently, that it is isotropic about distant points. This taken as an…
Observational tests for the homogeneity of the Universe on large scales are reviewed. Assuming the Cosmological Principle we then estimate cosmological parameters by joint analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background, Supernovae Ia, peculiar…
The current suite of results from Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy experiments is fulfilling the promise of providing extraordinary levels of discrimination between cosmological models. We calculate a binned anisotropy power spectrum,…
Using the fact that the comoving angular diameter distance to the last scattering surface is strictly constrained almost model independently, we show that, for any model agreeing with the standard $\Lambda$CDM model on its background…
The possibility to constrain fractal space dimensionality from Astrophysics and other areas is briefly reviewed. Assuming such dimensionality to be $3 + \epsilon$, a limit to $\epsilon$ can be inferred from COBE satellite data. The…
The fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are investigated for a small open universe, i.e., one which is periodically composed of a small fundamental cell. The evolution of initial metric perturbations is computed using the…
Recent measurements of a peak in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background appear to suggest that geometry of the universe is close to being flat. But if other accepted indicators of cosmological parameters are also…
We show that a good fitting to the first two years of {\it COBE}-DMR observations of the two-point angular correlation function of CBR temperature is given by models with a non-zero infrared cutoff $k_{min}$ in the spectrum of the…
We perform detailed calculations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in a CDM-dominated open universe with primordial adiabatic density perturbations for a variety of reionization histories. We show that to a great extent, the…
The spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background blackbody spectrum in a radially inhomogeneous spacetime, designed to exactly reproduce a LambdaCDM expansion history along the past light cone, is shown to exceed the upper bound…
We study the effect of global topology of the spatial geometry on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for closed flat and closed hyperbolic models in which the spatial hypersurface is multiply connected. If the CMB temperature…
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) radiation was a long-sought fossil of energetic processes associated with structure formation and chemical evolution since the Big Bang. The COBE Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) and Far…
The effect of a non-trivial topology on the temperature correlations on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in a small compact hyperbolic universe with volume comparable to the cube of the curvature radius is investigated. Because the…
The standard method for observationally confirming the existence of a predicted finite topology of the universe involves searching for the repetition of the same finite or extended source in different directions. However, serious problems…
The apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe is forcing us to examine the foundational aspects of the standard model of cosmology -- in particular, the fact that dark energy is a direct consequence of the homogeneity assumption. We…