Related papers: How Many Universes Do There Need To Be?
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
Nature abhors an infinity. The limits of general relativity are often signaled by infinities: infinite curvature as in the center of a black hole, the infinite energy of the singular big bang. We might be inclined to add an infinite…
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 shown that in the cosmological models based on a vacuum energy decaying as a^{-2}, where a is the scale factor of the universe, the fate of the universe in regard to whether it will collapse in future or expand forever is determined…
The concordance model of cosmology predicts a universe which finishes in a finite amount of conformal time at a future conformal boundary. We show that for particular cases we study, the background variables and perturbations may be…
We observe the past and present of the universe, but can we predict the far future? Observations suggest that in thousands of billions of years from now most matter and radiation will be absorbed by the cosmological horizon. As it absorbs…
Estimating the age of the Universe is an old problem. Rapid progress in observational cosmology in recent years has led to more accurate values of the fundamental parameters. The current most popular model is a flat Universe, with about 30%…
The Universe has a gravitational horizon, coincident with the Hubble sphere, that plays an important role in how we interpret the cosmological data. Recently, however, its significance as a true horizon has been called into question, even…
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…
In order to answer this question, we combine ten independent astrophysical constraints in the space of the density parameters $\Omega_m$ of gravitating matter and $\Omega_{\Lambda}$ of vacuum energy. We find that $\Omega_m=0.31\pm 0.07$,…
The diameter of the apparent horizon, defined by the distance between furthest points on the horizon, in spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant $\varLambda$ has been investigated. It is established that the diameter of the…
It has recently been claimed that the Hubble Sphere represents a previously unknown limit to our view of the universe, with light we detect today coming from a proper distance less than this "Cosmic Horizon" at the present time. By…
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
We consider a universe with an arbitrary number of extra dimensions, $N$. We present a new method for constructing the cosmological equations of motion and find analytic solutions with an explicit dependence on $N$. When we take the…
The conventional method to determine the cosmic curvature is to measure the total mass density $\Omega_{\rm tot}$. Unfortunately the observational $\Omega_{\rm tot}$ is closely near the critical value 1. The computation of this paper shows…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
We argue that whether the universe is infinite or finite is less crucial than usually supposed. Paradoxes of repeating behaviour in the infinite, or eternal inflationary, universe can be alleviated by a realistic definition of differing…
The Hilbert-Einstein equations are insufficient to describe the geometry of the Universe, as they only constrain a local geometrical property: curvature. A global knowledge of the geometry of space, if possible, would require measurement of…
Quantization of gravity suggests that a finite region of space has a finite number of degrees of freedom or `bits'. What happens to these bits when spacetime expands, as in cosmological evolution? Using gravity/field theory duality we argue…
We study the possibility to probe the spatial geometry of the Universe by supernova measurement of the cubic correction to the luminosity distance. We illustrate with an accelerating universe model with infinite-volume extra dimensions, for…