Related papers: Seeing Darkness: the New Cosmology
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…
We present a collection of new, open-source computational tools for numerically modeling recent large-scale observational data sets using modern cosmology theory. Specifically, these tools will allow both students and researchers to…
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…
The coming decade will be an exciting period for dark energy research, during which astronomers will address the question of what drives the accelerated cosmic expansion as first revealed by type Ia supernova (SN) distances, and confirmed…
A huge amount of good quality astrophysical data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing the today observed phase of accelerated expansion. This new observational trend is commonly addressed as Precision…
The precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, together with modern astrophysical, cosmological, and gravitational wave observations, increasingly points toward the existence of a ``dark" sector that cannot be explained within the…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration is one of the most important developments in modern cosmology. The observation, thirteen years ago, that type Ia supernovae appear dimmer that they would have been in a decelerating universe followed by…
Cosmologists are just beginning to probe the properties of the cosmic vacuum and its role in reversing the attractive pull of gravity to cause an acceleration in the expansion of the cosmos. The cause of this acceleration is given the…
Future weak lensing surveys will map the evolution of matter perturbations and gravitational potentials, yielding a new test of general relativity on cosmic scales. They will probe the relations between matter overdensities, local…
The luminosity-redshift relation of cosmological standard candles provides information about the relative energy composition of our Universe. In particular, the observation of type Ia supernovae up to redshift of z~2 indicate a universe…
Cosmography can be considered as a sort of a model-independent approach to tackle the dark energy/modified gravity problem. In this review, the success and the shortcomings of the $\Lambda$CDM model, based on General Relativity and standard…
Thermonuclear (Type Ia) supernovae are bright stellar explosions, the light curves of which can be calibrated to allow for use as "standard candles" for measuring cosmological distances. Contemporary research investigates how the brightness…
Understanding the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe, is a major challenge of modern cosmology. The next generation of cosmological surveys, specifically designed to address this…
Modifications to gravity can provide attractive alternatives to the dark components of the standard model of cosmology. These modifications to general relativity (GR) must be hidden at small scales where theory is well tested, and so one…
The kinematics and dynamic interpretation of the cosmological expansion is reviewed in a widely accessible manner with emphasis on the acceleration aspect. Virtually all the approaches that can in principle account for the accelerated…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
In the last decades, a cosmological model that fits observations through a vast range of scales emerged. It goes under the name of ${\Lambda}$CDM. However, there are still challenging questions that remain unanswered by this model, such as…
Modified gravity theories are a popular alternative to dark energy as a possible explanation for the observed accelerating cosmic expansion, and their cosmological tests are currently an active research field. Studies in recent years have…
The proper usage of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) as distance indicators has revolutionized cosmology, and added a new dominant component to the energy density of the Universe, dark energy. Following the discovery and confirmation era, the…
This document presents the results from the Distances subgroup of the Cosmic Frontier Community Planning Study (Snowmass 2013). We summarize the current state of the field as well as future prospects and challenges. In addition to the…