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We find that current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy data strongly constrain the mean spatial curvature of the Universe to be near zero, or, equivalently, the total energy density to be near critical-as predicted by inflation.…
Full suite of the present day Cosmic Microwave background (CMB) data, when combined with weak prior information on the Hubble constant and the age of the Universe, or the Large-Scale structure, provides strong indication for a non-zero…
Current observational bounds on dark energy depend on assumptions about the curvature of the universe. We present a simple and efficient method for incorporating constraints from CMB anisotropy data, and use it to derive constraints on…
It has been recently shown that the presence of a vector field over cosmological scales could explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe without introducing neither new scales nor unnatural initial conditions in the early…
As a physical and sufficient compression of the full CMB data, the CMB distance priors, or shift parameters, have been widely used and provide a convenient way to include CMB data when obtaining cosmological constraints. In this paper, we…
Several kinds of astronomical observations, interpreted in the framework of the standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology, have indicated that our universe is dominated by a Cosmological Constant. The dimming of distant Type Ia…
Supernova distance and primary CMB anisotropy measurements provide powerful probes of the dark energy evolution in a flat universe but degrade substantially once curvature is marginalized. We show that lensed CMB polarization power spectrum…
The $\Lambda$CDM framework offers a remarkably good description of our universe with a very small number of free parameters, which can be determined with high accuracy from currently available data. However, this does not mean that the…
Probing the geometry of the universe is one of the most important endevours in cosmology. Current observational data from the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy (CMB), galaxy surveys and type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) strongly constrain…
The dimming of Type Ia supernovae could be the result of Hubble-scale inhomogeneity in the matter and spatial curvature, rather than signaling the presence of a dark energy component. A key challenge for such models is to fit the detailed…
It is well known that observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are highly sensitive to the spatial curvature of the Universe, k. Here we find that what is in fact being tightly constrained by small angle fluctuations is spatial…
A plethora of models of the universe have been proposed in recent years claiming that the present universe is accelerating, being driven by some hypothetical source with negative pressure collectively known as {\it dark energy} which though…
General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at cosmological distance scales from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom required by the trace anomaly of the quantum stress tensor in curved space. In the theory including the…
The equation of state of the hypothetical dark energy component, which constitutes about two thirds of the critical density of the universe, may be very different from that of a cosmological constant. Employing a phenomenological model, we…
The effects of mass-varying neutrinos on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large scale structures (LSS) are studied. In these models, dark energy and neutrinos are coupled such that the neutrino masses are functions of the…
In this work we examine what are the cosmological implications of allowing the geometrical curvature density to behave independently from the energy density contents. Using the full data extracted by Planck mission from CMB, combined with…
Recent SN1a data have probed deeper into space than ever before. Plotted as distance vs. recession speed, a disturbing non-linearity is found which has led to speculations about "dark energy" which somehow acts like anti-gravity. This study…
The idea of a negative-pressure dark energy component in the Universe which causes an accelerated expansion in the late Universe has deep implications in models of field theory and general relativity. In this article, we survey the evidence…
We investigate observational constraints on the curvature of the universe not restricting ourselves to a cosmological constant as dark energy, in particular allowing a dark energy equation of state to evolve with time in several ways. We…
We examine the constraints that can be obtained on standard cold dark matter models from the most currently used data set: CMB anisotropies, type Ia supernovae and the SDSS luminous red galaxies. We also examine how these constraints are…