Related papers: Cosmic Concordance
There are many indications that ordinary matter represents only a tiny fraction of the matter content of the Universe, with the remainder assumed to consist of some different type of matter, which, for various reasons must be nonluminous…
Current astronomical observations are successfully explained by the present cosmological paradigm based on the concordance model ($\Lambda_0$CDM + Inflation). However, such a scenario is composed of a heterogeneous mix of ingredients for…
The discussion of cosmological parameters used to be a source of embarrassment to cosmologists. Today, measurements of the cosmological parameters are leading the way into the era of precision cosmology. The CMB temperature is measured to…
Current measurements of the Hubble constant $H_0$ on scale less than $\sim100$ Mpc appear to be controversial, while the observations made at high redshift seem to provide a relatively low value. On the other hand, the Hubble expansion is…
We discuss observational constraints on models of open inflation. Current data from large-scale structure and the cosmic microwave background prefer models with blue spectra and/or Omega_0 >= 0.3--0.5. Models with minimal anisotropy at…
We describe the implications of cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations and galaxy and cluster surveys of large scale structure (LSS) for theories of cosmic structure formation, especially emphasizing the recent Boomerang and Maxima…
The formation of structure in the Universe offers some of the most powerful evidence in favour of the existence of dark matter in the Universe. We summarize recent work by ourselves and our collaborators, using linear and quasi-linear…
We revisit the observational constraints on spatial curvature following recent claims that the Planck data favour a closed Universe. We use a new and statistically powerful Planck likelihood to show that the Planck temperature and…
We determine the range of parameter space of Interacting Quintessence Models that best fits the recent WMAP measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background temperature anisotropies. We only consider cosmological models with zero spatial…
We explore a broad class of three-parameter inflationary models, called the $\Lambda$-inflation, and its observational predictions: high abundance of cosmic gravitational waves consistent with the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum of primordial…
It has been claimed recently that massive sterile neutrinos could bring about a new concordance between observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, and local measurements of the…
Following the recent measurement of the acoustic peak by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiments in the CMB anisotropy angular power spectrum, many analyses have found that the geometry of the Universe is very close to flat, but slightly…
The CMB is already one of the pillars of the Big Bang model. However it may also become our most powerful tool to distinguish contending models and to determine their cosmological parameters. To realize this goal, more than 20 observational…
Cosmological observables are particularly sensitive to key ratios of energy densities and rates, both today and at earlier epochs of the Universe. Well-known examples include the photon-to-baryon and the matter-to-radiation ratios. Equally…
Slow-roll inflation generically makes several predictions: a flat Universe, primordial adiabatic density perturbations, and a stochastic gravity-wave background. Each inflation model will further predict specific relations between the…
The $\Lambda$CDM model faces several tensions with recent cosmological data and their increased accuracy. The mismatch between the values of the Hubble constant $H_0$ obtained from direct distance ladder measurements and from the cosmic…
The nature of dark matter is increasingly constrained by cosmological data. In this paper, we examine the implications of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy limits on the density of cold dark matter under different theoretical…
Observations conducted over the last few decades show that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. In the standard model of cosmology, this accelerated expansion is attributed to a dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant.…
Evidence for a positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$, derived from the Ly$\alpha$-forest in high-resolution spectra of quasars, leads to a closed, low-density, $\Lambda$-dominated universe. The analysis is based on the assumption of a…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. In this short review, we briefly summarize theories for the origin of cosmic acceleration and the observational methods being used to…