Related papers: The Mysterious Dark Energy
Though the concept of a dark energy driven accelerating universe was introduced by the author in 1997, to date dark energy itself, as described below has remained a paradigm. A model for the cosmological constant is suggested.
Dark energy is one of the mysteries of modern science. It is unlike any known form of matter or energy and has been detected so far only by its gravitational effect of repulsion. Owing to its effects being discernible only at very very…
Till the late nineties the accepted cosmological model was that of a Universe that had originated in the Big Bang and was now decelerating under the influence of as yet undetected dark matter, so that it would come to a halt and eventually…
Dark energy is an elusive concept, which has been introduced two decades ago in order to make the acceleration of the universe a comprehensible phenomenon. However, the nature of this energy is far from being understood, both from a…
Some seventy five years ago, the concept of dark matter was introduced by Zwicky to explain the anomaly of galactic rotation curves, though there is no clue to its identity or existence to date. In 1997, the author had introduced a model of…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
The expansion of the universe has been accepted by scientists for more than a century. However, since the 1990s, observations have suggested that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Although the source of this acceleration is…
Although dark energy is a modern concept, some elements in it can be traced back to the early part of the twentieth century. This paper examines the origin of the idea of zero-point energy and in particular how it appeared in a cosmological…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Acceleration of the universe might be driven by a continuous elastic medium -- elastic dark energy (Bucher and Spergel 1999). Elastic dark energy can stably support equations of state with pressure to energy ratio w > -4/3. Stable expansion…
A web of interlocking observations has established that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up and not slowing, revealing the presence of some form of repulsive gravity. Within the context of general relativity the cause of cosmic…
One of the most important and surprising discoveries in cosmology in recent years is the realization that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious dark energy, which leads to an accelerating expansion of space-time. A simple generalization…
Recently, a dark energy model characterized by the age of the universe, dubbed ``agegraphic dark energy'', was proposed by Cai. In this paper, a connection between the quintessence scalar-field and the agegraphic dark energy is established,…
Dark Energy is currently one of the biggest mysteries in science. In this article the origin of the concept is traced as far back as Newton and Hooke in the seventeenth century. Newton considered, along with the inverse square law, a force…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
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…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
The discovery that we live in an accelerating universe changed drastically the paradigm of physics and introduced the concept of \textit{dark energy}. In this work, we present a brief historical description of the main events related to the…
The cosmological constant, which was introduced by Einstein a century ago to allow for a static universe, experienced a revival two decades ago under the label dark energy as a parameter to model the observed accelerated expansion of the…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark…