Related papers: The Rees-Sciama effect and the primordial nucleosy…
We study particle decay as the origin of dark radiation. After elaborating general properties and useful parametrisations we provide model-independent and easy-to-use constraints from nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background and…
The Cold Spot (CS) is a clear feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB); it could be of primordial origin, or caused by a intervening structure along the line of sight. We identified a large projected underdensity in the recently…
Measurements of the SNe Ia Hubble diagram which suggest that the universe is accelerating due to the effect of dark energy may be biased because we are located in a 200-300 Mpc underdense "void" which is expanding 20-30% faster than the…
The existence of big bang relic neutrinos - exact analogues of the big bang relic photons comprising the cosmic microwave background radiation - is a basic prediction of standard cosmology. At present, the observational evidence for their…
A black hole illuminated by a background light source is observed as a black hole shadow. For a black hole formed by gravitational collapse of a transmissive object, redshift of light due to the spacetime dynamics is expected to play a…
We calculate the effect of variation in the light-current quark mass, $m_q$, on standard big bang nucleosynthesis. A change in $m_q$ at during the era of nucleosynthesis affects nuclear reaction rates, and hence primordial abundances, via…
In this paper we study the effect of a magnetic field on the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. We find that upcoming measurements might give interesting bounds on large scale magnetic fields in the early Universe. If…
This is the second paper of a series devoted to the study of the cosmological implications of the existence of mirror dark matter. The parallel hidden mirror world has the same microphysics as the observable one and couples the latter only…
The redshift dependence of the cosmic microwave background temperature, $T(z)=T_0(1+z)$, is a key prediction of standard cosmology, but this relation is violated in many extensions thereof. Current astrophysical facilities can probe it in…
Using cosmological simulations, we make predictions for the distribution of clusters in a plausible non-gaussian model where primordial voids nucleated during inflation act together with scale-invariant adiabatic gaussian fluctuations as…
A recent article by Wojtak {\it et al} (arXiv:1504.00718) pointed out that the local gravitational redshift, despite its smallness ($\sim 10^{-5}$), can have a noticeable ($\sim 1\%$) systematic effect on our cosmological parameter…
The high ionization level and universal metallicity (1% solar) of the intergalactic gas at redshifts z<5 implies that nonlinear structure had started to form in the universe at earlier times than we currently probe. In Cold Dark Matter…
An initial state for the observable universe consisting of a finite region with a large vacuum energy will break-up due to near horizon quantum critical fluctuations. This will lead to a Friedmann-like early universe consisting of an…
Cosmic voids offer an extraordinary opportunity to study the effects of massive neutrinos on cosmological scales. Because they are freely streaming, neutrinos can penetrate the interior of voids more easily than cold dark matter or baryons,…
We consider a cosmological scenario where a relativistic particle and a stable massive particle are simultaneously produced from the decay of a late-decaying particle after Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis but before matter-radiation equality. The…
We consider the effects of large structures in the Universe on the Hubble diagram. This problem is treated non-linearly by considering a Swiss Cheese model of the Universe in which under-dense voids are represented as negatively curved…
Recent measurements of cosmic-ray electron and positron fluxes by PAMELA and ATIC experiments may indicate the existence of annihilating dark matter with large annihilation cross section. We show that the dark matter annihilation in the…
Provided that matter-antimatter domains are present at the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), the number of allowed additional relativistic species increases, compared to the standard scenario when matter-antimatter domains are…
When dark matter structures form and equilibrate they have to release a significant amount of energy in order to obey the virial theorem. Since dark matter is believed to be unable to radiate, this implies that some of the accreted dark…
In this paper we investigate magnetic fields generated in the early Universe. These fields are important candidates at explaining the origin of astrophysical magnetism observed in galaxies and galaxy clusters, whose genesis is still by and…