Astrophysics

Among the possible explanations for the observed acceleration of the universe, perhaps the boldest is the idea that new gravitational physics might be the culprit. In this colloquium I will discuss some of the challenges of constructing a sensible phenomenological extension of General Relativity, give examples of some candidate models of modified gravity and survey existing observational constraints on this approach. I will conclude by discussing how we might hope to distinguish between modifications of General Relativity and dark energy as competing hypotheses to explain cosmic acceleration.

Dark matter and dark energy can be explained without resorting to exotic fields if one accepts that the geometry of spacetime is governed by suitable generalized gravitational theories based on Lagrangians that are non-linear in the curvature of a metric and/or a torsionless linear connection, i.e. in second order and first order formalisms. A convenient choice of nonquadratic Lagrangians can fit well most of the astrophysical, cosmological and solar system requirements imposed by experimental results, without drastic modifications of Einstein field equations and with FRW Cosmologies preserved as a good approximation of Nature at a global scale.

We show that the current accelerated expansion of the Universe can be explained without resorting to dark energy. Models of generalized modified gravity, with inverse powers of the curvature can have late time accelerating attractors without conflicting with solar system experiments. We have solved the Friedman equations for the full dynamical range of the evolution of the Universe. This allows us to perform a detailed analysis of Supernovae data in the context of such models that results in an excellent fit. Hence, inverse curvature gravity models represent an example of phenomenologically viable models in which the current acceleration of the Universe is driven by curvature instead of dark energy. If we further include constraints on the current expansion rate of the Universe from the Hubble Space Telescope and on the age of the Universe from globular clusters, we obtain that the matter content of the Universe is 0.07 <= omega_m <= 0.21 (95% Confidence). Hence the inverse curvature gravity models considered can not explain the dynamics of the Universe just with a baryonic matter component.

In the future it may be possible to observe the CMB radiation at very low frequencies. I review the origin of the signal from 21cm absorption by dark-age gas and explain the huge potential for observational cosmology. I summarise recent work on theoretical expectations for the observable power spectrum, including discussion of Hubble-scale perturbations, the effects of perturbed recombination and non-linear evolution.

Anthropic arguments based on selection effects for observers have been claimed to succesfully explain the measured value of the cosmological constant.In this talk I review the fundations of such claims in the context of probability theory and show that different (and equally legitimate) ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an explicit example, I discuss a weighting scheme based on the total number of possible observations that observers can carry out over the entire lifetime of the Universe. I show that this leads to an extremely small probability for observing a value of the cosmological constant equal to or greater than what we now measure, in marked contrast with the usual result. I also discuss principles of consistent probabilistic reasoning, showing that the anthropic principle as applied in most of the literature is logically inconsistent. I conclude that current implementations of the anthropic principle display a worrysome lack of predictivity, and cannot be used to explain the value of the cosmological constant, nor, likely, any other physical parameters.