A non-standard cosmology is any physical cosmological model of the universe that was, or still is, proposed as an alternative to the then-current standard model of cosmology. The term non-standard is applied to any theory that does not conform to the scientific consensus. Because the term depends on the prevailing consensus, the meaning of the term changes over time. For example, hot dark matter would not have been considered non-standard in 1990, but would have been in 2010. Conversely, a non-zero cosmological constant resulting in an accelerating universe would have been considered non-standard in 1990, but is part of the standard cosmology in 2010.
Several major cosmological disputes have occurred throughout the history of cosmology. One of the earliest was the Copernican Revolution, which established the heliocentric model of the Solar System. More recent was the Great Debate of 1920, in the aftermath of which the Milky Way's status as but one of the Universe's many galaxies was established. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the astrophysical community was equally divided between supporters of the Big Bang theory and supporters of a rival steady state universe; this is currently decided in favour of the Big Bang theory by advances in observational cosmology in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, there remained vocal detractors of the Big Bang theory including Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar, Halton Arp, and Hannes Alfvén, whose cosmologies were relegated to the fringes of astronomical research. The few Big Bang opponents still active today often ignore well-established evidence from newer research, and as a consequence, today non-standard cosmologies that reject the Big Bang entirely are rarely published in peer-reviewed science journals but appear online in marginal journals and private websites.[1]
Modern physical cosmology as it is currently studied first emerged as a scientific discipline in the period after the Shapley–Curtis debate and discoveries by Edwin Hubble of a cosmic distance ladder when astronomers and physicists had to come to terms with a universe that was of a much larger scale than the previously assumed galactic size. Theorists who successfully developed cosmologies applicable to the larger-scale universe are remembered today as the founders of modern cosmology. Among these scientists are Arthur Milne, Willem de Sitter, Alexander Friedman, Georges Lemaître, and Albert Einstein himself.
After confirmation of the Hubble's law by observation, the two most popular cosmological theories became the Steady State theory of Hoyle, Gold and Bondi, and the big bang theory of Ralph Alpher, George Gamow, and Robert Dicke with a small number of supporters of a smattering of alternatives. One of the major successes of the Big Bang theory compared to its competitor was its prediction for the abundance of light elements in the universe that corresponds with the observed abundances of light elements. Alternative theories do not have a means to explain these abundances.
Theories which assert that the universe has an infinite age with no beginning have trouble accounting for the abundance of deuterium in the cosmos, because deuterium easily undergoes nuclear fusion in stars and there are no known astrophysical processes other than the Big Bang itself that can produce it in large quantities. Hence the fact that deuterium is not an extremely rare component of the universe suggests both that the universe has a finite age and that there was a process that created deuterium in the past that no longer occurs.
Theories which assert that the universe has a finite life, but that the Big Bang did not happen, have problems with the abundance of helium-4. The observed amount of 4He is far larger than the amount that should have been created via stars or any other known process. By contrast, the abundance of 4He in Big Bang models is very insensitive to assumptions about baryon density, changing only a few percent as the baryon density changes by several orders of magnitude. The observed value of 4He is within the range calculated.
Still, it was not until the discovery of the Cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, that most cosmologists finally concluded that observations were best explained by the big bang model. Steady State theorists and other non-standard cosmologies were then tasked with providing an explanation for the phenomenon if they were to remain plausible. This led to original approaches including integrated starlight and cosmic iron whiskers, which were meant to provide a source for a pervasive, all-sky microwave background that was not due to an early universe phase transition.
Artist depiction of the WMAP spacecraft at the L2 point. Data gathered by this spacecraft has been successfully used to parametrize the features of standard cosmology, but complete analysis of the data in the context of any non-standard cosmology has not yet been achieved.
Scepticism about the non-standard cosmologies' ability to explain the CMB caused interest in the subject to wane since then, however, there have been two periods in which interest in non-standard cosmology has increased due to observational data which posed difficulties for the big bang. The first occurred was the late 1970s when there were a number of unsolved problems, such as the horizon problem, the flatness problem, and the lack of magnetic monopoles, which challenged the big bang model. These issues were eventually resolved by cosmic inflation in the 1980s. This idea subsequently became part of the understanding of the big bang, although alternatives have been proposed from time to time. The second occurred in the mid-1990s when observations of the ages of globular clusters and the primordial helium abundance, apparently disagreed with the big bang. However, by the late 1990s, most astronomers had concluded that these observations did not challenge the big bang and additional data from COBE and the WMAP, provided detailed quantitative measures which were consistent with standard cosmology.
Today, heterodox non-standard cosmologies are generally considered unworthy of consideration by cosmologists while many of the historically significant nonstandard cosmologies are considered to have been falsified. The essentials of the big bang theory have been confirmed by a wide range of complementary and detailed observations, and no non-standard cosmologies have reproduced the range of successes of the big bang model. Speculations about alternatives are not normally part of research or pedagogical discussions, except as object lessons or for their historical importance. An open letter started by some remaining advocates of non-standard cosmology has affirmed that: "today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies...."[3]
In the 1990s, a dawning of a "golden age of cosmology" was accompanied by a startling discovery that the expansion of the universe was, in fact, accelerating. Previous to this, it had been assumed that matter either in its visible or invisible dark matter form was the dominant energy density in the universe. This "classical" big bang cosmology was overthrown when it was discovered that nearly 70% of the energy in the universe was attributable to the cosmological constant, often referred to as "dark energy". This has led to the development of a so-called concordance ΛCDM model which combines detailed data obtained with new telescopes and techniques in observational astrophysics with an expanding, density-changing universe. Today, it is more common to find in the scientific literature proposals for "non-standard cosmologies" that actually accept the basic tenets of the big bang cosmology, while modifying parts of the concordance model. Such theories include alternative models of dark energy, such as quintessence, phantom energy and some ideas in brane cosmology; alternative models of dark matter, such as modified Newtonian dynamics; alternatives or extensions to inflation such as chaotic inflation and the ekpyrotic model; and proposals to supplement the universe with a first cause, such as the Hartle–Hawking boundary condition, the cyclic model, and the string landscape. There is no consensus about these ideas amongst cosmologists, but they are nonetheless active fields of academic inquiry.
Alternatives to Big Bang cosmologies
Before observational evidence was gathered, theorists developed frameworks based on what they understood to be the most general features of physics and philosophical assumptions about the universe. When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915, this was used as a mathematical starting point for most cosmological theories.[4] In order to arrive at a cosmological model, however, theoreticians needed to make assumptions about the nature of the largest scales of the universe. The assumptions that the current standard model of cosmology relies upon are:
the cosmological principle– that the universe is roughly homogeneous and isotropic in space though not necessarily in time, and
the Copernican principle– that we are not observing the universe from a preferred locale.
These assumptions when combined with General Relativity result in a universe that is governed by the Friedmann–Robertson–Walker metric (FRW metric). The FRW metric allows for a universe that is either expanding or contracting (as well as stationary but unstable universes). When Hubble's Law was discovered, most astronomers interpreted the law as a sign the universe is expanding. This implies the universe was smaller in the past, and therefore led to the following conclusions:
the universe emerged from a hot, dense state at a finite time in the past,
because the universe heats up as it contracts and cools as it expands, in the first moments that time existed as we know it, the temperatures were high enough for Big Bang nucleosynthesis to occur, and
a cosmic microwave background pervading the entire universe should exist, which is a record of a phase transition that occurred when the atoms of the universe first formed.
These features were derived by numerous individuals over a period of years; indeed it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that accurate predictions of the last feature and observations confirming its existence were made. Non-standard theories developed either by starting from different assumptions or by contradicting the features predicted by the prevailing standard model of cosmology.[5]
The Steady State theory extends the homogeneity assumption of the cosmological principle to reflect a homogeneity in time as well as in space. This "perfect cosmological principle" as it would come to be called asserted that the universe looks the same everywhere (on the large scale), the same as it always has and always will. This is in contrast to Lambda-CDM, in which the universe looked very different in the past and will look very different in the future. Steady State theory was proposed in 1948 by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi and others. In order to maintain the perfect cosmological principle in an expanding universe, steady state cosmology had to posit a "matter-creation field" (the so-called C-field) that would insert matter into the universe in order to maintain a constant density.[5]
The debate between the Big Bang and the Steady State models would happen for 15 years with camps roughly evenly divided until the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This radiation is a natural feature of the Big Bang model which demands a "time of last scattering" where photons decouple with baryonic matter. The Steady State model proposed that this radiation could be accounted for by so-called "integrated starlight" which was a background caused in part by Olbers' paradox in an infinite universe. In order to account for the uniformity of the background, steady state proponents posited a fog effect associated with microscopic iron particles that would scatter radio waves in such a manner as to produce an isotropic CMB. The proposed phenomena was whimsically named "cosmic iron whiskers" and served as the thermalization mechanism. The Steady State theory did not have the horizon problem of the Big Bang because it assumed an infinite amount of time was available for thermalizing the background.[5]
As more cosmological data began to be collected, cosmologists began to realize that the Big Bang correctly predicted the abundance of light elements observed in the cosmos. What was a coincidental ratio of hydrogen to deuterium and helium in the steady state model was a feature of the Big Bang model. Additionally, detailed measurements of the CMB since the 1990s with the COBE, WMAP and Planck observations indicated that the spectrum of the background was closer to a blackbody than any other source in nature. The best integrated starlight models could predict was a thermalization to the level of 10% while the COBE satellite measured the deviation at one part in 105. After this dramatic discovery, the majority of cosmologists became convinced that the steady state theory could not explain the observed CMB properties.
Although the original steady state model is now considered to be contrary to observations (particularly the CMB) even by its one-time supporters, modifications of the steady state model have been proposed, including a model that envisions the universe as originating through many little bangs rather than one big bang (the so-called "quasi-steady state cosmology"). It supposes that the universe goes through periodic expansion and contraction phases, with a soft "rebound" in place of the Big Bang. Thus the Hubble Law is explained by the fact that the universe is currently in an expansion phase. Work continues on this model (most notably by Jayant V. Narlikar), although it has not gained widespread mainstream acceptance.[6]
Alternatives and extensions to Lambda-CDM
The standard model of cosmology today, the Lambda-CDM model, has been extremely successful at providing a theoretical framework for structure formation, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and the accelerating expansion of the universe. However, it is not without its problems.[7] There are many proposals today that challenge various aspects of the Lambda-CDM model. These proposals typically modify some of the main features of Lambda-CDM, but do not reject the Big Bang.
Isotropicity – the idea that the universe looks the same in all directions – is one of the core assumptions that enters into the Friedmann equations. In 2008 however, scientists working on Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data claimed to have detected a 600–1000km/s flow of clusters toward a 20-degree patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.[8] They suggested that the motion may be a remnant of the influence of no-longer-visible regions of the universe prior to inflation. The detection is controversial, and other scientists have found that the universe is isotropic to a great degree.[9]
Solitary black holes, neutron stars, burnt-out dwarfs, and other massive objects that that are hard to detect are collectively known as MACHOs; some scientists initially hoped that baryonic MACHOs could account for and explain all the dark matter.[10][11] However, evidence has accumulated that these objects cannot explain a large fraction of the dark matter mass.[12]
In Lambda-CDM, dark matter is a form of matter that that interacts with both ordinary matter and light only through gravitational effects. To produce the large-scale structure we see today, dark matter is "cold" (the 'C' in Lambda-CDM), i.e. non-relativistic. Dark matter has not been conclusively identified, and its exact nature is the subject of intense study. Hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axions[13] and primordial black holes[14] are the leading dark matter candidates but there are a variety of other proposals, e.g.:
Warm dark matter, which are more relativistic than cold dark matter, but less relativistic than the observationally-excluded hot dark matter.
Fuzzy cold dark matter, which have particles much lighter than axions – in the 10−22 eV range.
Yet other theories attempt to explain dark matter and dark energy as different facets of the same underlying fluid (see dark fluid), or hypothesize that dark matter could decay into dark energy.
The equation of state of Dark Energy for 4 common models as a function of redshift. Our current universe is at , and the cosmological constant has . A: CPL Model, B: Jassal Model, C: Barboza & Alcaniz Model, D: Wetterich Model
In Lambda-CDM, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. It is less well-understood than dark matter, and similarly mysterious. The simplest explanation of dark energy is the cosmological constant (the 'Lambda' in Lambda-CDM). This is a simple constant added to the Einstein field equations to provide a repulsive force. Thus far observations are fully consistent with the cosmological constant, but leave room for a plethora of alternatives, e.g.:
Quintessence, which is a scalar field similar to the one that drove cosmic inflation shortly after the Big Bang. In quintessence, dark energy will usually vary over time (as opposed to the cosmological constant, which remains a constant).
Inhomogeneous cosmology. One of the fundamental assumptions of Lambda-CDM is that the universe is homogeneous – that is, it looks broadly the same regardless of where the observer is. In the inhomogeneous universe scenario, the observed dark energy is a measurement artefact caused by us being located at an emptier-than-average region of space.
Variable dark energy, which is similar to quintessence in that the properties of dark energy vary over time (see figure), but different in that dark energy is not due to a scalar field.
General relativity, upon which the FRW metric is based, is an extremely successful theory which has met every observational test so far. However, at a fundamental level it is incompatible with quantum mechanics, and by predicting singularities, it also predicts its own breakdown. Any alternative theory of gravity would immediately imply an alternative cosmological theory since Lambda-CDM is dependent on general relativity as a framework assumption. There are many different motivations to modify general relativity, such as to eliminate the need for dark matter or dark energy, or to avoid such paradoxes as the firewall.
There are very many modified gravity theories, none of which have gained widespread acceptance, although it remains an active field of research. Some of the more notable theories are below.
Ernst Mach developed a kind of extension to general relativity which proposed that inertia was due to gravitational effects of the mass distribution of the universe. This led naturally to speculation about the cosmological implications for such a proposal. Carl Brans and Robert Dicke were able to successfully incorporate Mach's principle into general relativity which admitted for cosmological solutions that would imply a variable mass. The homogeneously distributed mass of the universe would result in a roughly scalar field that permeated the universe and would serve as a source for Newton's gravitational constant; creating a theory of quantum gravity.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a relatively modern proposal to explain the galaxy rotation problem based on a variation of Newton's Second Law of Dynamics at low accelerations. This would produce a large-scale variation of Newton's universal theory of gravity. A modification of Newton's theory would also imply a modification of general relativistic cosmology in as much as Newtonian cosmology is the limit of Friedman cosmology. While almost all astrophysicists today reject MOND in favor of dark matter, a small number of researchers continue to enhance it, recently incorporating Brans–Dicke theories into treatments that attempt to account for cosmological observations.
Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS) is a proposed relativistic theory that is equivalent to Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) in the non-relativistic limit, which purports to explain the galaxy rotation problem without invoking dark matter. Originated by Jacob Bekenstein in 2004, it incorporates various dynamical and non-dynamical tensor fields, vector fields and scalar fields.
The break-through of TeVeS over MOND is that it can explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, a cosmic optical illusion in which matter bends light, which has been confirmed many times. A recent preliminary finding is that it can explain structure formation without CDM, but requiring a ~2eV massive neutrino (they are also required to fit some Clusters of galaxies, including the Bullet Cluster).[16][17] However, other authors (see Slosar, Melchiorri and Silk)[18] argue that TeVeS can not explain cosmic microwave background anisotropies and structure formation at the same time, i.e. ruling out those models at high significance.
f(R) gravity is a family of theories that modify general relativity by defining a different function of the Ricci scalar. The simplest case is just the function being equal to the scalar; this is general relativity. As a consequence of introducing an arbitrary function, there may be freedom to explain the accelerated expansion and structure formation of the Universe without adding unknown forms of dark energy or dark matter. Some functional forms may be inspired by corrections arising from a quantum theory of gravity. f(R) gravity was first proposed in 1970 by Hans Adolph Buchdahl[19] (although φ was used rather than f for the name of the arbitrary function). It has become an active field of research following work by Starobinsky on cosmic inflation.[20] A wide range of phenomena can be produced from this theory by adopting different functions; however, many functional forms can now be ruled out on observational grounds, or because of pathological theoretical problems.
Other alternatives
Kaluza–Klein theory, which posits an extra spatial dimension, thereby making our universe 5D instead of the 4D of General Relativity. The DGP model is one of the models in this category, claimed to be able to explain dark energy without invoking a cosmological constant.
Entropic gravity, which describes gravity as an entropic force with macro-scale homogeneity but which is subject to quantum-level disorder. The theory claims to be able to remove the need for dark matter, as well as provide a natural explanation for dark energy.
The GRSI model modifies General Relativity by adding self-interaction terms similar to those in quantum chromodynamics, leading to an effect similar to quark confinement in gravity. It is claimed to be able to explain observations without needing dark matter or dark energy.[21]
Shockwave cosmology, proposed by Joel Smoller and Blake Temple in 2003, has the “big bang” as an explosion inside a black hole, producing the expanding volume of space and matter that includes the observable universe. This black hole eventually becomes a white hole as the matter density reduces with the expansion.[22] A related theory proposes that the acceleration of the expansion of the observable universe, normally attributed to dark energy, may be caused by an effect of the shockwave.[23]
↑ Alcock, C.; Allsman, R. A.; Axelrod, T. S.; Bennett, D. P.; Cook, K. H.; Freeman, K. C.; Griest, K.; Guern, J. A.; Lehner, M. J.; Marshall, S. L.; Park, H.-S.; Perlmutter, S.; Peterson, B. A.; Pratt, M. R.; Quinn, P. J. (April 1996). "The MACHO Project First Year LMC Results: The Microlensing Rate and the Nature of the Galactic Dark Halo". The Astrophysical Journal. 461: 84. arXiv:astro-ph/9506113. doi:10.1086/177039. ISSN0004-637X.
Hannes, Alfvén D., Cosmic Plasma. Reidel Pub Co., 1981. ISBN90-277-1151-8
Hoyle, Fred; Geoffrey Burbidge, and Jayant V. Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality. Cambridge University Press. 2000. ISBN0-521-66223-0
Lerner, Eric J., Big Bang Never Happened, Vintage Books, 1992. ISBN0-679-74049-X
Narlikar, Jayant Vishnu, Introduction to Cosmology. Jones & Bartlett Pub. 2nd edition, 1993 ISBN9780521412506
The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. It was first proposed in 1927 by Roman Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form. These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The overall uniformity of the universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments. However, physics currently lacks a widely accepted theory of quantum gravity that can successfully model the earliest conditions of the Big Bang.
Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch is believed to have lasted from 10−36 seconds to between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The re-acceleration of this slowing expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old.
In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle states that humans, on the Earth or in the Solar System, are not privileged observers of the universe, that observations from the Earth are representative of observations from the average position in the universe. Named for Copernican heliocentrism, it is a working assumption that arises from a modified cosmological extension of Copernicus' argument of a moving Earth.
In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be seen. Such effects occur in the context of formation and evolution of galaxies, gravitational lensing, the observable universe's current structure, mass position in galactic collisions, the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies.
Observations show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, such that the velocity at which a distant galaxy recedes from the observer is continuously increasing with time. The accelerated expansion of the universe was discovered in 1998 by two independent projects, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, which used distant type Ia supernovae to measure the acceleration. The idea was that as type Ia supernovae have almost the same intrinsic brightness, and since objects that are farther away appear dimmer, the observed brightness of these supernovae can be used to measure the distance to them. The distance can then be compared to the supernovae's cosmological redshift, which measures how much the universe has expanded since the supernova occurred; the Hubble law established that the farther away that an object is, the faster it is receding. The unexpected result was that objects in the universe are moving away from one another at an accelerating rate. Cosmologists at the time expected that recession velocity would always be decelerating, due to the gravitational attraction of the matter in the universe. Three members of these two groups have subsequently been awarded Nobel Prizes for their discovery. Confirmatory evidence has been found in baryon acoustic oscillations, and in analyses of the clustering of galaxies.
The ultimate fate of the universe is a topic in physical cosmology, whose theoretical restrictions allow possible scenarios for the evolution and ultimate fate of the universe to be described and evaluated. Based on available observational evidence, deciding the fate and evolution of the universe has become a valid cosmological question, being beyond the mostly untestable constraints of mythological or theological beliefs. Several possible futures have been predicted by different scientific hypotheses, including that the universe might have existed for a finite and infinite duration, or towards explaining the manner and circumstances of its beginning.
The Big Crunch is a hypothetical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the expansion of the universe eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately causing the cosmic scale factor to reach zero, an event potentially followed by a reformation of the universe starting with another Big Bang. The vast majority of evidence indicates that this hypothesis is not correct. Instead, astronomical observations show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than being slowed by gravity, suggesting that a Big Chill is more likely. However, some physicists have proposed that a "Big Crunch-style" event could result from a dark energy fluctuation.
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. Astronomers have derived two different measurements of the age of the universe: a measurement based on direct observations of an early state of the universe, which indicate an age of 13.787±0.020 billion years as interpreted with the Lambda-CDM concordance model as of 2021; and a measurement based on the observations of the local, modern universe, which suggest a younger age. The uncertainty of the first kind of measurement has been narrowed down to 20 million years, based on a number of studies that all show similar figures for the age. These studies include researches of the microwave background radiation by the Planck spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other space probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang, and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time. The range of the estimate is also within the range of the estimate for the oldest observed star in the universe.
The Lambda-CDM, Lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM model is a mathematical model of the Big Bang theory with three major components:
a cosmological constant denoted by lambda (Λ) associated with dark energy
the postulated cold dark matter denoted by CDM
ordinary matter
In physical cosmology, structure formation is the formation of galaxies, galaxy clusters and larger structures from small early density fluctuations. The universe, as is now known from observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation, began in a hot, dense, nearly uniform state approximately 13.8 billion years ago. However, looking at the night sky today, structures on all scales can be seen, from stars and planets to galaxies. On even larger scales, galaxy clusters and sheet-like structures of galaxies are separated by enormous voids containing few galaxies. Structure formation attempts to model how these structures were formed by gravitational instability of small early ripples in spacetime density or another emergence.
The history of the Big Bang theory began with the Big Bang's development from observations and theoretical considerations. Much of the theoretical work in cosmology now involves extensions and refinements to the basic Big Bang model. The theory itself was originally formalised by Father Georges Lemaître in 1927. Hubble's Law of the expansion of the universe provided foundational support for the theory.
The expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion, so it does not mean that the universe expands "into" anything or that space exists "outside" it. To any observer in the universe, it appears that all but the nearest galaxies recede at speeds that are proportional to their distance from the observer, on average. While objects cannot move faster than light, this limitation applies only with respect to local reference frames and does not limit the recession rates of cosmologically distant objects.
An inhomogeneous cosmology is a physical cosmological theory which, unlike the currently widely accepted cosmological concordance model, assumes that inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter across the universe affect local gravitational forces enough to skew our view of the Universe. When the universe began, matter was distributed homogeneously, but over billions of years, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and superclusters have coalesced, and must, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, warp the space-time around them. While the concordance model acknowledges this fact, it assumes that such inhomogeneities are not sufficient to affect large-scale averages of gravity in our observations. When two separate studies claimed in 1998-1999 that high redshift supernovae were further away than our calculations showed they should be, it was suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and dark energy, a repulsive energy inherent in space, was proposed to explain the acceleration. Dark energy has since become widely accepted, but it remains unexplained. Accordingly, some scientists continue to work on models that might not require dark energy. Inhomogeneous cosmology falls into this class.
The golden age of cosmology is a term often used to describe the period from 1992 to the present in which important advances in observational cosmology have been made.
In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. Assuming that the lambda-CDM model of cosmology is correct, dark energy is the dominant component of the universe, contributing 68% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe while dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contribute 26% and 5%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons are nearly negligible. Dark energy's density is very low: 6×10−10 J/m3, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it dominates the universe's mass–energy content because it is uniform across space.
The Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity is a Machian and conformal theory of gravity proposed by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar that originally fits into the quasi steady state model of the universe.
CMB spectral distortions are tiny departures of the average cosmic microwave background (CMB) frequency spectrum from the predictions given by a perfect black body. They can be produced by a number of standard and non-standard processes occurring at the early stages of cosmic history, and therefore allow us to probe the standard picture of cosmology. Importantly, the CMB frequency spectrum and its distortions should not be confused with the CMB anisotropy power spectrum, which relates to spatial fluctuations of the CMB temperature in different directions of the sky.
The GRSI model is an attempt to explain astrophysical and cosmological observations without dark matter, dark energy or modifying the laws of gravity as they are currently established. This model is an alternative to Lambda-CDM, the standard model of cosmology.
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