Astronomy *: Cosmology

Free yourself from cosmological tyranny! Everything started in a Big Bang? Invisible dark matter? Black holes? Why accept such a weird cosmos? For all those who wonder about this bizarre universe, and those who want to overthrow the Big Bang, this handbook gives you 'just the facts': the observations that have shaped these ideas and theories. While the Big Bang holds the attention of scientists, it isn't perfect. The authors pull back the curtains, and show how cosmology really works. With this, you will know your enemy, cosmic revolutionary - arm yourself for the scientific arena where ideas must fight for survival! This uniquely-framed tour of modern cosmology gives a deeper understanding of the inner workings of this fascinating field. The portrait painted is realistic and raw, not idealized and airbrushed - it is science in all its messy detail, which doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang--and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history. Taking readers into the remarkable world of cosmology, Dan Hooper describes many of the extraordinary and perplexing questions that scientists are asking about the origin and nature of our world. Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang and test promising theories for how and why our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. We may be poised to finally discover how dark matter was formed during our universe's first moments, and, with new telescopes, we are also lifting the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it. Wrestling with the mysteries surrounding the initial moments that followed the Big Bang, At the Edge of Time presents an accessible investigation of our universe and its origin.

Cosmology seeks to characterise our Universe in terms of models based on well-understood and tested physics. Today we know our Universe with a precision that once would have been unthinkable. This book develops the entire mathematical, physical and statistical framework within which this has been achieved. It tells the story of how we arrive at our profound conclusions, starting from the early twentieth century and following developments up to the latest data analysis of big astronomical datasets. It provides an enlightening description of the mathematical, physical and statistical basis for understanding and interpreting the results of key space- and ground-based data. Subjects covered include general relativity, cosmological models, the inhomogeneous Universe, physics of the cosmic background radiation, and methods and results of data analysis. Extensive online supplementary notes, exercises, teaching materials, and exercises in Python make this the perfect companion for researchers, teachers and students in physics, mathematics, and astrophysics.

This comprehensive textbook is devoted to classical and quantum cosmology, with particular emphasis on modern approaches to quantum gravity and string theory and on their observational imprint. It covers major challenges in theoretical physics such as the big bang and the cosmological constant problem. An extensive review of standard cosmology, the cosmic microwave background, inflation and dark energy sets the scene for the phenomenological application of all the main quantum-gravity and string-theory models of cosmology.       Born of the author's teaching experience and commitment to bridging the gap between cosmologists and theoreticians working beyond the established laws of particle physics and general relativity, this is a unique text where quantum-gravity approaches and string theory are treated on an equal footing. As well as introducing cosmology to undergraduate and graduate students with its pedagogical presentation and the help of 45 solved exercises, this book, which includes an ambitious bibliography of about 3500 items, will serve as a valuable reference for lecturers and researchers.

An Introduction to Modern Cosmology Third Edition is an accessible account of modern cosmological ideas. The Big Bang Cosmology is explored, looking at its observational successes in explaining the expansion of the Universe, the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background, and the origin of light elements in the universe. Properties of the very early Universe are also covered, including the motivation for a rapid period of expansion known as cosmological inflation. The third edition brings this established undergraduate textbook up-to-date with the rapidly evolving observational situation. This fully revised edition of a bestseller takes an approach which is grounded in physics with a logical flow of chapters leading the reader from basic ideas of the expansion described by the Friedman equations to some of the more advanced ideas about the early universe. It also incorporates up-to-date results from the Planck mission, which imaged the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation over the whole sky. The Advanced Topic sections present subjects with more detailed mathematical approaches to give greater depth to discussions. Student problems with hints for solving them and numerical answers are embedded in the chapters to facilitate the reader's understanding and learning. Cosmology is now part of the core in many degree programs. This current, clear and concise introductory text is relevant to a wide range of astronomy programs worldwide and is essential reading for undergraduates and Masters students, as well as anyone starting research in cosmology. The accompanying website for this text, http://booksupport.wiley.com, provides additional material designed to enhance your learning, as well as errata within the text.