What We Know and What We Don't Know About the Universe

Abstract

I present a non-technical and necessarily biased and incomplete overview of our present understanding of the physical universe and its constituents, emphasizing what we have learned from the explosive growth in cosmological and astrophysical data acquisition and some of the key open questions that remain. The topics are organized under the labels space, time, and matter. Most bibliographical references are for the non-expert.

5 pages, LaTeX. Keynote address at the International Workshop on Astronomy and Relativistc Astrophysics, October 12-16, Olinda, Brazil. To be published in the proceedings (Int. J. Mod. Phys. D)

References in corpus (5)

• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters
• Cosmological Constant - the Weight of the Vacuum
• Dodecahedral space topology as an explanation for weak wide-angle temperature correlations in the cosmic microwave background
• The Age of the Universe and the Cosmological Constant Determined from Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Measurements
• The Measure of Cosmological Parameters