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The standard $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter cosmological model provides an amazing description of a wide range of astrophysical and astronomical data. However, there are a few big open questions, that make the standard model look like a…
In the next 30 years, a new generation of space and ground-based telescopes will permit to obtain multi-frequency observations of faint sources and, for the first time in human history, to achieve a deep, almost synoptical monitoring of the…
From antiquity the conceptual perception of space changed painfully and at a relatively slow pace. It went through mythological descriptions, religious beliefs, metaphysical worldviews and cosmological models with a mechanistic structure,…
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…
Breakthroughs in physics and astrophysics are often driven by technological advances, with the recent detection of gravitational waves being one such example. This white paper focuses upon how improved astrometric and spectroscopic…
Despite the success of our best models in Theoretical Physics, especially concerning Cosmology and Particle Physics, we still face persistent challenges. Among them we have the cosmological singularity problem, understanding the late-time…
This is a review article for The Review of Particle Physics 2006 (aka the Particle Data Book). It forms a compact review of knowledge of the cosmological parameters as at May 2006. Topics included are Parametrizing the Universe; Extensions…
Synoptic sky surveys are becoming the largest data generators in astronomy, and they are opening a new research frontier, that touches essentially every field of astronomy. Opening of the time domain to a systematic exploration will…
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays. They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an…
In the standard cosmological model, the merger remnant of the Milky Way and Andromeda (Milkomeda) will be the only galaxy remaining within our event horizon once the Universe has aged by another factor of ten, ~10^{11} years after the Big…
With the beginning of the XXIst century, a physical model of our Universe, usually called the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM), is reaching an important level of consolidation, based on accurate astrophysical data and also on theoretical…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
The recent fit of cosmological parameters by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration will have a significant impact on our understanding of the universe. Given its importance, we conduct several consistency checks and…
The current accelerated expansion of the universe has been one of the most important fields in physics and astronomy since 1998. Many cosmological models have been proposed in the literature to explain this mysterious phenomenon. Since the…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in its thirteen years of operation, has allowed us to observe properties of the universe humans have been able, until very recently, to probe only with their thoughts. This review presents a brief summary…
In recent years, machine learning (ML) methods have remarkably improved how cosmologists can interpret data. The next decade will bring new opportunities for data-driven cosmological discovery, but will also present new challenges for…
One of the main challenges in cosmology is to quantify how small density fluctuations at the recombination epoch z around 1000 evolved into the galaxies and the large-scale structure we observe in the universe today. This thesis discusses…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
Lorentz time is replaced by three parameters: a global time, a local rate of aging, and a new spatial coordinate. This enables successful reconstruction of relativity's observables in a four dimensional Euclidean hyperspace. The new…