Table of Contents
The Early Universe
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Nebulae
The Great Debate
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Cosmic distances
Galaxies everywhere
The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Deep Field
The expanding universe
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Measuring redshifts
Hubble’s Law
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Age and distance
Some big questions
The expanding universe means that we can make a 3D map of the galaxies by measuring redshifts: The ‘Redshift Survey’
The distribution of the galaxies
Redshift surveys (mid-1980s)
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey
Going faster with fibre optics
Tha AAT and The 2-degree Field
2dF top end
2dF on the AAT
Tiling strategy
2dFGRS geometry
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The state of the art in galaxy clustering
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Why do galaxies, clusters, and superclusters exist? Simplest answer: because gravity can amplify density irregularities
Gravitational instability: hierarchical collapse generates ever larger structures
Simulating structure formation
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Forming superclusters (comoving view)
Non-gravitational caustics
The Hubble Volume Simulation
Our place in the universe
But this doesn’t explain anything! Why does the universe contain irregularities, and what determines their size? Need to think about the early history of the expanding universe
The ‘Big Bang’: running the expansion backwards implies an infinite density in the past
The expanding curved universe
The Hot Big Bang
The thermal history of the universe
Nucleosynthesis
Weighing the universe
Weighing the universe
What is dark matter?
The big problem with the big bang: need to set initial conditions at t=0 (1) Expanding (2) Slightly non-uniform
The missing ingredient: vacuum energy
Evidence for vacuum energy from distant supernovae
SN Ia Hubble Diagram
The cosmic energy budget
The Inflationary universe (1981: long before vacuum energy was proved to exist today)
The History of the vacuum?
History of the expansion
The uncertainty principle (1927)
Quantum fluctuations and cosmic structure
Observing fluctuations from the early universe: Furthest back we can see is the microwave background (z = 1100)
COBE Microwave Sky (1992)
COBE Microwave sky: 1,000 X stretch
COBE microwave sky: 25,000 X stretch
Observing prehistoric structure
Impact of WMAP (2003)
Testing inflation
The cosmic puzzle
The anthropic universe
The outlook for cosmology
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