Related papers: New "Bigs" in cosmology
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at macroscopic distance scales and near event horizons. These arise from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom in the extended effective field theory of gravity generated by the…
Cosmological consequences of a string-motivated dark energy scenario featuring a scalar field coupled to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant are investigated. We study the evolution of the universe in such a model, identifying its key properties.…
A recent cosmological model is recapitulated which deduces the correct mass, radius and age of the universe as also the Hubble constant and other well known apparently coincidental relations. It also predicts an ever expanding accelerating…
The familiar Bang/Crunch singularities of classical cosmology have recently been augmented by new varieties: rips, sudden singularities, and so on. These tend to be associated with final states. Here we consider an alternative possibility…
Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…
An overview is presented of a recently proposed "radically conservative" solution to the problem of dark energy in cosmology. The proposal yields a model universe which appears to be quantitatively viable, in terms of its fit to supernovae…
Over the past century, rooted in the theory of general relativity, cosmology has developed a very successful physical model of the universe: the {\em big-bang model}. Its construction followed different stages to incorporate nuclear…
In the Big Rip cosmological scenario, a FRW universe containing dark energy with $w < -1$ in its equation of state (phantom energy) expands in such way that, in a finite time span, the scale factor diverges to infinity and the size of the…
We describe a case of indeterminacy in general relativity for homogeneous and isotropic cosmologies for a class of dark energy fluids. The cosmologies are parametrized by an equation of state variable, with one instance giving the same…
We conjecture that space-like singularities are simply regions in which all available degrees of freedom are excited, and the system cycles randomly through generic quantum states in its Hilbert space. There is no simple geometric…
The physically relevant singularities occurring in FRW cosmologies had traditionally been thought to be limited to the "big bang", and possibly a "big crunch". However, over the last few years, the zoo of cosmological singularities…
Explanations of the late-time cosmic acceleration within the framework of general relativity are plagued by difficulties. General relativistic models are mostly based on a dark energy field with fine-tuned, unnatural properties. There is a…
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their…
It was recently suggested that "cosmologically coupled" black holes with masses that increase in proportion to the volume of the Universe might constitute the physical basis of dark energy. We take this claim at face value and discuss its…
We show that if the masses of timelike fields are point-dependent quantities transforming under conformal transformations as $m\rightarrow\Omega^{-1}m$, so the energy density of perfect fluids transforms as $\rho\rightarrow\Omega^{-4}\rho$,…
We propose a new notion of singularity in General Relativity which complements the usual notions of geodesic incompleteness and curvature singularities. Concretely, we say that a spacetime has a volume singularity if there exist points…
Coherent states consist of superposition of infinite number of particles and do not have a classical analogue. We study their evolution in a FLRW cosmology and show that only when full quantum corrections are considered, they may survive…
It has been claimed in several papers that a phantom energy-dominated universe can undergo a ``big trip'', i.e., tunneling through a wormhole that grows faster than the cosmic substratum due to the accretion of phantom energy, and will…
We review recent efforts to construct gravitational theories on discrete space-times, usually referred to as the ``consistent discretization'' approach. The resulting theories are free of constraints at the canonical level and therefore…