Related papers: Why is the Universe Accelerating?
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
The early cosmic inflation, when taken along with the recent observations that the universe is currently dominated by a low density vacuum energy, leads to at least two potential problems which modern cosmology must address. First, there is…
We investigate the gravitational property of the quantum vacuum by treating its large energy density predicted by quantum field theory seriously and assuming that it does gravitate to obey the equivalence principle of general relativity. We…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
It is pointed out that very recent results based on supernovae observations that the universe will accelerate and expand for ever with ever decreasing density have been predicted in a recent cosmological model which also deduces hitherto…
The discovery of accelerated cosmic expansion implies that, in addition to the attractive gravity of matter, there exists in our universe some other form of energy (dark energy or cosmological constant) producing a repulsive force. The…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
Theoretical cosmologists were quick to be convinced by the evidence presented in 1998 for the accelerating Universe. I explain how this remarkable discovery was the missing piece in the grand cosmological puzzle. When found, it fit…
It is generally argued that the present cosmological observations support the accelerating models of the universe, as driven by the cosmological constant or `dark energy'. We argue here that an alternative model of the universe is possible…
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…
The accelerated expansion of the universe is the most debatable cosmological scenario in the last two decades. Looking for the proper explanation of this scenario, researchers have presented a lot of proposals to discuss it. However,…
The homogeneous expansion history H(z) of our universe measures only kinematic variables, but cannot fix the underlying dynamics driving the recent acceleration: cosmographic measurements of the homogeneous universe, are consistent with…
The discovery of the accelerating universe in the late 1990s was a watershed moment in modern cosmology, as it indicated the presence of a fundamentally new, dominant contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Evidence for dark…
Cosmic acceleration is explained quantitatively, as an apparent effect due to gravitational energy differences that arise in the decoupling of bound systems from the global expansion of the universe. "Dark energy" is a misidentification of…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
Detailed observations of the temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation indicate that we live in an open universe. From the size of these fluctuations it is concluded that the geometry of the universe is quite close to…
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…
Observational evidence indicating that the expansion of the universe is accelerating has surprised cosmologists in recent years. Cosmological models have sought to explain this acceleration by incorporating `dark energy', of which the…
Recent observations suggest that a large fraction of the energy density of the universe has negative pressure. One explanation is vacuum energy density; another is quintessence in the form of a scalar field slowly evolving down a potential.…