Related papers: Was There a Decelerating Past for the Universe?
There has been increasing interest by cosmologists in applying Bayesian techniques, such as Bayesian Evidence, for model selection. A typical example is in assessing whether observational data favour a cosmological constant over evolving…
Correctly interpreting observations of sources such as type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) require knowledge of the power spectrum of matter on AU scales - which is very hard to model accurately. Because under-dense regions account for much of the…
These notes aim at presenting an overview of Bayesian statistics, the underlying concepts and application methodology that will be useful to astronomers seeking to analyse and interpret a wide variety of data about the Universe. The level…
Theoretical and observational cosmology have enjoyed a number of significant successes over the last two decades. Cosmic microwave background measurements from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck, together with large-scale…
This review gives an update of the cosmological use of SNe Ia and the progress made in testing their properties from the local universe to high-z. The cosmological road from high-z supernovae down to Galactic SNe Ia is followed in search of…
The model-independent method of using type Ia supernovae proposed and developed by Daly and Djorgovski (2003, 2004) has been applied to the Riess et al. (2007) supernovae sample. Assuming only a Robertson-Walker metric, we find that the…
The surprising discovery of an accelerating universe led cosmologists to posit the existence of "dark energy"--a mysterious energy field that permeates the universe. Understanding dark energy has become the central problem of modern…
The latest improvements in the scale and calibration of Type Ia supernovae catalogues allow us to constrain the specific nature and evolution of dark energy through its effect on the expansion history of the universe. We present the results…
The most intriguing question of modern astronomy is the question of our Universe formation. The Hubble diagram analysis with Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) is widely used to estimate the cosmological parameters with high accuracy. The…
The recent type Ia supernova data suggest that the universe is accelerating now and decelerated in recent past. This may provide the evidence that the standard Friedmann equation needs to be modified. We analyze in detail a new model in the…
Type Ia supernovae luminosities can be corrected to render them useful as standard candles able to probe the expansion history of the universe. This technique was successful applied to discover the present acceleration of the universe. As…
The possibility of an expanding decelerating Universe in the distant future is investigated in the context of a quintessence scalar field cosmology. Such a conceivable evolution is tested against SNe Ia and $H(z)$ cosmic chronometers data,…
Bayesian Inference is a powerful approach to data analysis that is based almost entirely on probability theory. In this approach, probabilities model {\it uncertainty} rather than randomness or variability. This thesis is composed of a…
Observation of thousands of type Ia supernovae should offer the most direct approach to probe the dark energy content of the universe. This will be undertaken by future large ground-based surveys followed by a space mission (SNAP/JDEM). We…
Traditional cosmological inference using Type Ia supernovae (SNeIa) have used stretch- and color-corrected fits of SN Ia light curves and assumed a resulting fiducial mean and symmetric intrinsic dispersion for the resulting relative…
We use the redshift Hubble parameter $H(z)$ data derived from relative galaxy ages, distant type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) peak, and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) shift parameter data, to…
We explore the distance-redshift relation using a cosmographic methodology, and show how the cosmographic parameters can be used to determine the redshift of transition from deceleration to acceleration. Such a transition at a low redshift…
Large scale astronomical surveys are going wider and deeper than ever before. However, astronomers, cosmologists and theorists continue to face the perennial issue that their data sets are often incomplete in magnitude space and must be…
I review the use of type-Ia supernovae (SNe) for cosmological studies. After briefly recalling the main features of type-Ia SNe that lead to their use as cosmological probes, I briefly describe current and planned type-Ia SNe surveys, with…
Over the last 20 years, supernovae have become a key tool to constrain the expansion history of the Universe through the construction of Hubble diagrams, using luminosity distances to supernovae belonging to the "Ia" subtype. This technique…