Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe

Abstract

The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark energy. At the same time, it posed one of the most profound mysteries in all of science, with deep connections to both astrophysics and particle physics. Cosmic acceleration could arise from the repulsive gravity of dark energy -- for example, the quantum energy of the vacuum -- or it may signal that General Relativity breaks down on cosmological scales and must be replaced. We review the present observational evidence for cosmic acceleration and what it has revealed about dark energy, discuss the various theoretical ideas that have been proposed to explain acceleration, and describe the key observational probes that will shed light on this enigma in the coming years.

Invited review for Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics; 53 pages, 18 figures

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Cited by in corpus (37)

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• Infrared cut-off proposal for the Holographic density
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• Mapping the Cosmological Expansion
• Type Ia Supernova Light Curve Inference: Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis in the Near Infrared
• An Accelerating Cosmology Without Dark Energy
• On the quantum fate of singularities in a dark-energy dominated universe
• Growth Index of DGP Model and Current Growth Rate Data
• Axions and the white dwarf luminosity function
• The spherical collapse model and cluster formation beyond the $\Lambda$ cosmology: Indications for a clustered dark energy?
• Constraints on Kinematic Model from Recent Cosmic Observations: SN Ia, BAO and Observational Hubble Data
• Constraining Dark Energy with Clusters: Complementarity with Other Probes
• The transient and the late time attractor tachyon dark energy: Can we distinguish it from quintessence ?
• Induced cosmological constant and other features of asymmetric brane embedding
• The solution of the cosmological constant problem from the inhomogeneous equation of state - a hint from modified gravity?
• Initiation of the detonation in the gravitationally confined detonation model of Type Ia supernovae
• Accelerating Universe with spacetime torsion but without dark matter and dark energy
• The Averaging Problem in Cosmology
• Consistency Test of Dark Energy Models
• Constraints on dark energy from baryon acoustic peak and galaxy cluster gas mass measurements
• Can cosmic acceleration be caused by exotic massless particles?
• Inference for the dark energy equation of state using Type IA supernova data
• Dynamical evolutin of quintessence dark energy in collapsing dark matter halos
• X-ray Clusters of Galaxies as Cosmological Tools
• A primer on problems and prospects of dark energy
• The Weight of Vacuum Fluctuations
• Null geodesics and observational cosmology
• A Locally Anisotropic Metric for Matter in an Expanding Universe: I. The Ansatz and the Modified Newton Law
• Current observational constraints on holographic dark energy model
• The inhomogeneous equation of state and the road towards the solution of the cosmological constant problem
• The Vacuum and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• The inhomogeneous equation of state and the speed of convergence to a small cosmological constant
• Physics and Cosmology : the Milli-Electron-Volt Scale
• Mass Determination of New Particle States
• Nonrelativistic Dark-Energy Fluid in a Baby Universe
• Dark Matter and Dark Energy