Related papers: The Long-Term Future of Extragalactic Astronomy
In the last decade or so there has been debate over the possibility that the fuzzy quantum nature of spacetime might decohere wavefronts emanating from very distant sources. Consequences of that could be "blurred" or "faded" images of…
Observations of distant supernovae indicate that the Universe is now in a phase of accelerated expansion the physical cause of which is a mystery. Formally, this requires the inclusion of a term acting as a negative pressure in the…
Motivated by the current controversy over the redshift distribution and physical properties of luminous (sub-)mm sources, we have undertaken a new study of the brightest sample of unlensed (sub-)mm sources with pre-ALMA interferometric…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
I point out that an effective upper limit of approximately 20 Gyr (for a Hubble constant of 72 km/s/Mpc) or alternatively on the $H_0$-independent quantity $H_0t_0 < 1.47$, exists on the age of the Universe, essentially independent of the…
The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate, together with the total energy density of the Universe, sets the size of the observable Universe, its age, and its radius of curvature. Excellent progress has been made recently toward…
A large number of cosmological studies now suggest that roughly two-thirds of the critical energy density of the Universe exists in a component with negative pressure. If the equation of state of such an energy component varies with time,…
Although dust emission at cosmological distances has only been detected a little more than a decade ago, remarkable progress has been achieved since then in characterizing the far-infrared emission of high-redshift systems. The mere fact…
The comoving luminosity density of the Universe is estimated from the CFRS faint galaxy sample in three wavebands (2800A, 4400A and 1 micron) over the redshift range 0 < z < 1. In all three wavebands, the comoving luminosity density…
Measurements of the cosmic redshift drift - the change in redshift of a source over time - will enable independent detection of cosmological expansion thanks to the immense precision soon reached by new facilities such as the Square…
The next generation of gamma-ray telescopes may be able to observe gamma-ray blazars at high redshift, possibly out to the epoch of reionization. The spectrum of such sources should exhibit an absorption edge due to pair-production against…
We address the effects of cosmological surface brightness dimming on observations of faint galaxies by examining the distribution of "unobscured" star formation rate intensities versus redshift. We use the star formation rate intensity…
Galaxy redshift surveys have achieved significant progress over the last couple of decades. Those surveys tell us in the most straightforward way what our local universe looks like. While the galaxy distribution traces the bright side of…
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to push back the redshift frontier to ever earlier cosmic epochs, with recent announcements of galaxy candidates at redshifts of $15 \lesssim z \lesssim 30$. We leverage the recent GUREFT suite of…
I briefly review our current knowledge of the cosmological evolution of radio sources, and show that the redshift distributions of new complete samples of radio sources confirm the existence of the high-redshift decline in comoving number…
Redshift drift provides a direct kinematic measurement of cosmic acceleration but it occurs with a characteristic time scale of a Hubble time. Thus redshift observations with a challenging precision of $10^{-9}$ require a 10 year time span…
Cosmological observations usually map our present-day past light cone. However, it is also possible to compare different past light cones. This is the concept behind the redshift drift, a model-independent probe of fundamental cosmology. In…
Almost half a century ago, Greisen, Zatsepin and Kuz'min (GZK) predicted a "cosmologically meaningful termination" of the spectrum of cosmic rays at energies around $10^{20}$ eV due to their interaction with the cosmic microwave background,…
The so-called `impossibly early galaxy' problem, first identified via the Hubble Space Telescope's observation of galaxies at redshifts z > 10, appears to have been exacerbated by the more recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovery…
Observed magnitudes of many quasars with redshifts exceeding $z=5$ correspond to luminosities $L_{\rm bol} > 10^{14}\,L_\odot$. The standard mechanism of quasar energy release by accretion suggests that masses of superluminous quasars…