Related papers: Cosmic Topology: a Brief Overview
The standard cosmological model, now strongly constrained by direct observation at early epochs, is very successful in describing the structure of the evolved universe on large and intermediate scales. Unfortunately, serious contradictions…
It has long been a primary objective of cosmology to understand the apparent isotropy in our universe and to provide a mathematical formulation for its evolution. A school of thought for its explanation is quiescent cosmology, which already…
A basic modern picture of the universe is given here. The lectures start from the historical ideas of a static universe. Then I move on to Newtonian cosmology and derive the main cosmological equations in the framework of Newtonian…
Cosmology is built on a relativistic understanding of gravity, where the geometry of the Universe is dynamically determined by matter and energy. In the cosmological concordance model, gravity is described by General Relativity, and it is…
The question of the nature of galaxy clustering and the possible homogeneity of galaxy distribution is one of the fundamental problem of cosmology. It is well established that galaxy structures are characterized, up to a certain scale, by…
An introduction to modern theories for the origin of structure in the Universe is given. After a brief review of the growth of cosmological perturbations in an expanding Universe and a summary of some important observational results, the…
We aim to bring a new perspective about some aspects of the current research in Cosmology. We start with a brief introduction about the main developments of the field in the last century; then we introduce an analogy that shall elucidate…
The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
This is one chapter of the collection of problems in cosmology, in which we assemble the problems, with solutions, that concern one of the most distinctive features of general relativity and cosmology---the horizons. The first part gives an…
We consider the properties of an ensemble of universes as function of size, where size is defined in terms of the asymptotic value of the Hubble constant (or, equivalently, the value of the cosmological constant). We assume that standard…
The possibility of obtaining an open set of regular cosmological models is discussed. Cylindrical stiff perfect fluid cosmologies are studied in detail. The condition for geodesic completeness is easy to check. A large family of…
In this review, we outline the expected tests of gravity that will be achieved at cosmological scales in the upcoming decades. We focus mainly on constraints on phenomenologically parameterized deviations from general relativity, which…
Despite the observational evidence that the Universe appears hierarchically structured up to a distance of at least 30 Mpc/h (and possibly up to 100 Mpc/h), the fractal paradigm has not yet been recognized by the majority of cosmologists…
Geometry of the universe has always intrigued mathematicians and cosmologists. Recent results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Project (WMAP) indicate that the visible universe is incredibly flat. This apparent flatness could be due…
In this essay we discuss the difference in views of the Universe as seen by two different observers. While one of the observers follows a geodesic congruence defined by the geometry of the cosmological model, the other observer follows the…
Quantum cosmology has traditionally been studied at the level of symmetry-reduced minisuperspace models, analyzing the behavior of wave functions. However, in the absence of a complete full setting of quantum gravity and detailed knowledge…
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…
The changes of main paradigms on the structure and evolution of the Universe are reviewed. Two puzzles of the modern cosmology, the mean density of matter and the regularity of the Universe on large scales, as well as the possibility to…
In this review we discuss several aspects of Cosmic Voids. Voids are a major component of the large scale distribution of matter and galaxies in the Universe. They are of instrumental importance for understanding the emergence of the Cosmic…
Multi-connected Universe models with space idenfication scales smaller than the size of the observable universe produce topological images in the catalogs of cosmic sources. In this review, we present the recent developments for the search…