An overview is given of the current status of the theory and observations of the acceleration of the expansion of the observable part of the Universe.
Contents
1. Historical Introduction
2. Friedmann equations and cosmological acceleration
3. Vacuum energy problem
4. Data in favor of cosmological acceleration
5.Data on supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations
5.1 Cosmography primer: distances in the Universe; 5.2 Photometric distance; 5.3 Cosmic distance ladder; 5.4 Variety of type-Ia supernovae light curves and their usage in cosmography; 5.5 Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs); 5.6 BAOs in the correlation function of galaxies; 5.7 Summary of results on supernovae combined with BAOs; 5.8 Systematics and dependence on z; 5.9 Supernovae as primary distance indicators; 5.10 Merging of neutron stars and the standard siren method
6. Dark energy
7. Modified gravity
8.Conclusion
9.Appendices
9.1 Derivation of the Friedmann equations; 9.2 Cosmological parameters; 9.3 Scalar field
Cosmological probes at any redshift are necessary to reconstruct consistently the cosmic history. Studying properly the tension on the Hubble constant, $H_0$, obtained by Supernovae Type Ia (SNe Ia) and the Planck measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation would require complete samples of distance indicators at any epoch. Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are necessary for the aforementioned task because of their huge luminosity that allows us to extend the cosmic ladder at very high redshifts. However, using GRBs alone as standard candles is challenging because their luminosity varies w…
We reconstruct in this paper the deceleration and jerk parameters as functions of the cosmological redshift from data on cosmic chronometers (CCH), baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), and the Pantheon+MCT compilation of supernovae of Type Ia (SnIa). The reconstruction is carried out with the Weighted Function Regression method, previously introduced by Gómez-Valent & Amendola (2018). It improves the usual cosmographic approach by automatically implementing Occam's razor criterion. This makes our procedure to be more free of model and parametrization dependencies than many other analyses in th…
Sound waves from the primordial fluctuations of the Universe imprinted in the large-scale structure, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), can be used as standard rulers to measure the scale of the Universe. These oscillations have already been detected in the distribution of galaxies. Here we propose to measure BAOs from the troughs (minima) of the density field. Based on two sets of accurate mock halo catalogues with and without BAOs in the seed initial conditions, we demonstrate that the BAO signal cannot be obtained from the clustering of classical disjoint voids, but is clearly dete…
We present an improved measurement of the Hubble constant (H_0) using the 'inverse distance ladder' method, which adds the information from 207 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) at redshift 0.018 < z < 0.85 to existing distance measurements of 122 low redshift (z < 0.07) SNe Ia (Low-z) and measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). Whereas traditional measurements of H_0 with SNe Ia use a distance ladder of parallax and Cepheid variable stars, the inverse distance ladder relies on absolute distance measurements from the BAOs to calibrate the intrinsic magn…
A recently proposed Asymptotically Safe cosmology provides an elegant mechanism towards understanding the nature of dark energy and its associated cosmic coincidence problem. The underlying idea is that the accelerated expansion of the universe can occur due to infrared quantum gravity modifications at intermediate astrophysical scales (galaxies or galaxy clusters) which produce local anti-gravity sources. In this cosmological model no extra unproven energy scales or fine-tuning are used. In this study the Asymptotically Safe model is confronted with the most recent observational data from low…
We use the HII galaxies $L - σ$ relation and the resulting Hubble expansion cosmological probe of a sample of just 25 high-$z$ (up to $z \sim 2.33$) HII galaxies, in a joint likelihood analysis with other well tested cosmological probes (CMB, BAOs) in an attempt to constrain the dark energy equation of state (EoS). The constraints, although still weak, are in excellent agreement with those of a similar joint analysis using the well established SNIa Hubble expansion probe. Interestingly, even with the current small number of available high redshift HII galaxies, the HII/BAO/CMB joint analysis g…
The standard relation between the cosmological redshift and cosmic scale factor underlies cosmological inference from virtually all kinds of cosmological observations, leading to the emergence of the LambdaCDM cosmological model. This relation is not a fundamental theory and thus observational determination of this function (redshift remapping) should be regarded as an insightful alternative to holding its standard form in analyses of cosmological data. Here we present non-parametric reconstructions of redshift remapping in dark-matter-dominated models and constraints on cosmological parameter…
A model of a universe without big bang singularity is presented, which displaysanearly inflationary period ending just before a phase transition to a deflationary epoch. The model produces enough heavy particles so as to reheat the universe at temperatures in the MeV regime. After the reheating, it smoothly matches the standard $Λ$CDM scenario.
We present a cosmological model arising from a gravitational theory with an infinite tower of higher-order curvature invariants that can reproduce the entire evolution of the Universe: from inflation to late-time acceleration, without invoking an inflaton nor a cosmological constant. The theory is Einsteinian-like. The field equations for a Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric are of second-order and can reproduce a late-time evolution that is consistent with the acceleration provided by the cosmological constant at low redshift. Our results force us to reinterpret the nature of dark ene…
Detecting the change of a cosmological object's redshift due to the time evolution of the Universal expansion rate is an ambitious experiment that will be attempted with future telescope facilities. In this paper, we describe the ACCELERATION programme, which aims to study the properties of the most underdense regions of the Universe. One of the highlight goals of this programme is to prepare for the redshift drift measurement. Using the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, we estimate the peculiar acceleration of gas in galaxies and in the Lya forest. We find that star-forming 'cold n…
Existing cosmological simulation methods lack a high degree of parallelism due to the long-range nature of the gravitational force, which limits the size of simulations that can be run at high resolution. To solve this problem, we propose a new, perfectly parallel approach to simulate cosmic structure formation, which is based on the spatial COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (sCOLA) framework. Building upon a hybrid analytical and numerical description of particles' trajectories, our algorithm allows for an efficient tiling of a cosmological volume, where the dynamics within each tile is comput…
The sequestering mechanism has been proposed as a remedy to the old cosmological constant problem of the non-gravitating vacuum energy in the matter sector. Here it is shown that an extension of this global constraint mechanism arises naturally from an averaging condition for residual cosmological constants produced in different patches of the Universe. The new mechanism naturally yields the small observed value that gives rise to cosmic acceleration at late times, hence, addressing the new cosmological constant problem. Hereby the halo model picture is adopted with all matter content ultimate…
A novel, interesting class of scalar-tensor gravity theories is those with a limit on the field motion, where the scalar field either goes to a constant acceleration or stops accelerating and goes to a constant velocity. We combine these with the ability to dynamically cancel a high energy cosmological constant, e.g. through the well tempered or self tuning approaches. One can successfully have a cosmic expansion history with a matter dominated epoch and late time acceleration despite a large cosmological constant, although the late time de Sitter limit may be unstable. Pole models, such as in…
With the advent of gravitational-wave astronomy marked by the aLIGO GW150914 and GW151226 observations, a measurement of the cosmological speed of gravity will likely soon be realized. We show that a confirmation of equality to the speed of light as indicated by indirect Galactic observations will have important consequences for a very large class of alternative explanations of the late-time accelerated expansion of our Universe. It will break the dark degeneracy of self-accelerated Horndeski scalar-tensor theories in the large-scale structure that currently limits a rigorous discrimination be…
Motivated by two seminal models proposed to explain the Universe acceleration, this paper is devoted to study a hybrid model which is constructed through a generalized Chaplygin gas with the addition of a bulk viscosity. We call the model a Viscous Generalized Chaplygin Gas (VGCG) and its free parameters are constrained through several cosmological data like the Observational Hubble Parameter, Type Ia Supernovae, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, Strong Lensing Systems, HII Galaxies and using Joint Bayesian analysis. In addition, we implement a Om-diagnostic to analyze the VGCC dynamics and its di…
We analyze the evolution of a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime within the framework of $f(R)$ metric gravity using an exponential model. We show that $f(R)$ gravity may lead to a vanishing effective cosmological constant in the far future (i.e. $R\rightarrow 0$) and yet produce a transient accelerated expansion at present time with a potentially viable cosmological history. This is in contrast with several $f(R)$ models which, while viable, produce in general a non-vanishing effective cosmological constant asymptotically in time ($R\rightarrow 4Λ_{\rm eff}$). We also show that relativistic…
Entropic-force cosmology provides, in contrast with dark energy descriptions, a concrete physical understanding of the accelerated expansion of the universe. The acceleration appears to be a consequence of the entropy associated with the information storage in the universe. Since these cosmological models are unable of explaining the different periods of acceleration and deceleration unless a correction term is considered, we study the effects of including a subdominant power-law term within a thermodynamically admissible entropic-force model. The temperature of the universe horizon is obtaine…
It is well known that the Milgrom's MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) explains well the mass discrepancy problem in galaxy rotation curves. The MOND predicts a universal acceleration scale below which the Newtonian dynamics is invalid yet. The universal acceleration scale we got from the SPARC dataset is $g_†=1.02\times10^{-10} \rm m~s^{-2}$. Milgrom suggested that the acceleration scale may be a fingerprint of cosmology on local dynamics and related with the Hubble constant $g_†\sim cH_0$. In this paper, we use the hemisphere comparison method with the SPARC dataset to investigate the spatia…
We propose in this letter a relativistic coordinate independent interpretation for Milgrom's acceleration $a_{0}=1.2 \times 10^{-8} \hbox{cm/s}^{2}$ through a geometric constraint obtained from the product of the Kretschmann invariant scalar times the surface area of 2--spheres defined through suitable characteristic length scales for local and cosmic regimes, described by Schwarzschild and Friedman--Lema\^ıtre--Robertson--Walker (FLRW) geometries, respectively. By demanding consistency between these regimes we obtain an appealing expression for the empirical (so far unexplained) relation betw…
MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is an alternative to the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm which proposes an alteration of Newton's laws of motion at low accelerations, characterized by a universal acceleration scale a_0. It attempts to explain observations of galactic rotation curves and predicts a specific scaling relation of the baryonic and total acceleration in galaxies, referred to as the Rotational Acceleration Relation (RAR), which can be equivalently formulated as a Mass Discrepancy Acceleration Relation (MDAR). The appearance of these relations in observational data such as…
In this paper we demonstrate that with vacuum $F(G)$ gravity it is possible to describe the unification of late and early-time acceleration eras with the radiation and matter domination era. The Hubble rate of the unified evolution contains two mild singularities, so called Type IV singularities, and the evolution itself has some appealing features, such as the existence of a deceleration-acceleration transition at late times. We also address quantitatively a fundamental question related to modified gravity models description of cosmological evolution: Is it possible for all modified gravity d…
In the framework of polynomial Palatini cosmology, we investigate a simple cosmological homogeneous and isotropic model with matter in the Einstein frame. We show that in this model during cosmic evolution, it appears the early inflation and the accelerating phase of the expansion for the late times. In this frame we obtain the Friedmann equation with matter and dark energy in the form of a scalar field with the potential whose form is determined in a covariant way by the Ricci scalar of the FRW metric. The energy density of matter and dark energy are also parametrized through the Ricci scalar…
