Cosmological constraints on dark energy
arXiv:1404.7266 · doi:10.1007/s10714-014-1731-1
Abstract
It has been only ~15 years since the discovery of dark energy (although some may argue there were strong indications even earlier). In the short time since measurements of type Ia supernovae indicated an accelerating universe, many other techniques have now confirmed the acceleration is real. The variety of ways in which dark energy has been confirmed is one of the reasons we are so confident in the statement that most of the energy in the universe is in a form we can not see except through its gravitational influence. This review aims to summarise briefly the many varied ways we now have measured dark energy. The fact that these different techniques all indicate that the simplest model remains the best -- that dark energy contributes a constant background acceleration -- is remarkable, since each of these different types of measurements represented opportunities for this simplest model to fail. Although we currently lack a compelling theoretical explanation for this acceleration, any explanation will have to explain the wide variety of complementary observations that we review here. This is an informal presentation, following the lines of the talk I presented at the General Relativity and Gravitation (GR20) conference in Warsaw in July 2013.
23 pages, 8 figures. This astro-ph version contains bonus material (indicated by blue text) that would not fit within the published version's page limits
References in corpus (12)
- A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter
- Measuring the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale using the SDSS and 2dFGRS
- Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Ly-α forest of BOSS quasars
- Improving Cosmological Distance Measurements by Reconstruction of the Baryon Acoustic Peak
- Correlation of CMB with large-scale structure: I. ISW Tomography and Cosmological Implications
- Combined analysis of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect and cosmological implications
- COSMOS: 3D weak lensing and the growth of structure
- Cosmic dynamics in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes
- Detection of the ISW and SZ effects from the CMB-Galaxy correlation
- Current constraints on the cosmic growth history
- Precision cosmology defeats void models for acceleration
- The Velocity Field of the Local Universe from Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae