Related papers: Is Cosmic Acceleration Really Recent?
We investigate what current cosmological data tells us about the cosmological expansion rate in a model independent way. Specifically, we study if the expansion was decelerating at high redshifts and is accelerating now, without referring…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
The notion of self-acceleration has been introduced as a convenient way to theoretically distinguish cosmological models in which acceleration is due to modified gravity from those in which it is due to the properties of matter or fields.…
Associated with the cosmic acceleration are the old and new cosmological constant problems, recently put into the more general context of the dark energy problem. In broad terms, the old problem is related to an unexpected order of…
Relative motions have long been known to mislead the unsuspecting observers to false interpretations of reality. The deceptions are usually brief and unimportant, though relative motions have also led to illusions that were both…
By integration of generalized BSBM and Brans-Dicke cosmological models, in this article, we investigate the theoretical framework of fine structure constant variation and current cosmic acceleration. We first develop a mathematical…
The sequestering mechanism has been proposed as a remedy to the old cosmological constant problem of the non-gravitating vacuum energy in the matter sector. Here it is shown that an extension of this global constraint mechanism arises…
Cosmology is very exciting for three reasons. There is a very successful standard model - the hot big bang - which describes the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec onward. There are bold ideas, foremost among them are inflation and…
The current acceleration of the universe can be modeled in terms of a cosmological constant. We show that the extremely small value of \Lambda L_P^2 ~ 3.4 x 10^{-122}, the holy grail of theoretical physics, can be understood in terms of a…
This paper is the second of two papers devoted to the study of the evolution of the cosmological horizons (particle and event horizons). Specifically, in this paper we consider the extremely general case of an accelerated universe with…
We discuss recent evidence for an accelerating Universe from measurements of type Ia supernovae at high redshift, and describe tests of various systematic effects such as extinction and evolution that could be biasing the cosmological…
We explore the late time cosmological dynamics of the Universe within the framework of $f(Q,\mathcal{L}_{m})$ gravity by considering the specific form $f(Q, \mathcal{L}_m)=-Q+2\mathcal{L}_m+\gamma$. To describe the cosmic pressure…
Although big bang cosmology effectively models even the most puzzling observational data, it offers no insight into why the cosmological expansion should occur at all. In this paper it is suggested that a finite Universe poses particular…
Understanding the space of possible theoretical explanations for the observed cosmic acceleration is a central challenge of modern cosmology. This brief document sketches selected aspects of approaches to this problem, focusing on the…
A Universe with finite age also has a finite causal scale. Larger scales can not affect our local measurements or modeling, but far away locations could have different cosmological parameters. The size of our causal Universe depends on the…
One of the most important discoveries in modern cosmology is cosmic acceleration. However, we find that today's universe could decelerate in the statistically preferred Chevallier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) scenario over the $\Lambda$CDM model…
With the advent of gravitational-wave astronomy marked by the aLIGO GW150914 and GW151226 observations, a measurement of the cosmological speed of gravity will likely soon be realized. We show that a confirmation of equality to the speed of…
We explore cosmology in the decoupling limit of a non-linear covariant extension of Fierz-Pauli massive gravity obtained recently in arXiv:1007.0443. In this limit the theory is a scalar-tensor model of a unique form defined by symmetries.…
We investigate the cosmology of a recently proposed deformation of Einstein gravity, emerging from quantum gravity heuristics. The theory is constructed to have de Sitter space as a vacuum solution, and thus to be relevant to the…
The accelerating universe is closely related to today's version of the cosmological constant problem; fine-tuning and coincidence problems. We show how successfully the scalar-tensor theory, a rather rigid theoretical idea, provides us with…