Related papers: The Universe is a Strange Place
The nature of the dark matter in the Universe is one of the outstanding questions in astrophysics. In this talk, I address possible stellar baryonic contributions to the 50-90% of our Galaxy that is made of unknown dark matter. First I show…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
While the generally recognized symmetries of cosmos are preserved, conservation laws for gravitational system are reconsidered and the Lagrangian density of pure gravitational field is revised. From these considerations, some of the…
Neutrinos are one of the major puzzles in modern physics. Despite measurements of mass differences, the Standard Model of particle physics describes them as exactly massless. Additionally, recent measurements from both particle physics…
Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
There is something unknown in the cosmos. Something big. Which causes the acceleration of the Universe expansion, that is perhaps the most surprising and unexpected discovery of the last decades, and thus represents one of the most pressing…
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…
The flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for much of the past 20 years does not correspond to the Universe in which we live. This has profound implications both for our understanding of dark matter, and…
Two recent findings necessitate a closer look at the existing standard models of Particle Physics and Cosmology. These are the discovery of Neutrino oscillation, and hence a non zero mass on the one hand and, on the other, observations of…
Recent discoveries in the field of neutrino oscillations have provided a unique window into physics beyond the standard model. In this lecture, I summarize how well we understand the various observations, what they tell us about the nature…
We discuss the use of galaxies to trace the large-scale structure of the universe and thereby to make cosmological inferences. We put special emphasis on our lack of knowledge about the relative distribution of galaxies and the dynamically…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
During its first ~100,000 years, the universe was a fully ionized plasma with a tight coupling by Thompson scattering between the photons and matter. The trade--off between gravitational collapse and photon pressure causes acoustic…
Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Gigayears, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers…
For a few years now, cosmology has a standard model. By this term, we mean a consistent theoretical background which is at the same time simple and broad enough to offer coherent explanations for the vast majority of cosmological phenomena.…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
Standard calculations suggest that the entropy of our universe is dominated by black holes, whose entropy is of order their area in Planck units, although they comprise only a tiny fraction of its total energy. Statistical entropy is the…
The problem of the enormous gravitational effects observed by the astronomers in several galactic nuclei with obscure bodies appears puzzling. These bodies are too large to be neutron stars generated by supernovae of primeval stars and are…
In this article we address the mystery of dark matter. We expound the various evidences, astrophysical and cosmological, leading to hypothesize the existence of an invisible form of matter, whose attempts at detecting it have so far all…