Found 18 talks width keyword early universe

A discussion of the first observation ever of gravitational waves. Present detectors, future detectors, and the perspectives for gravitational wave astronomy.

Driven by the potential of large-scale structure (LSS) observations to shed light on the physics behind the accelerated expansion of the Universe, several ground-breaking galaxy surveys are currently under way. These surveys will measure the LSS of the Universe with unprecedented precision, providing new insights not only on the origin of cosmic acceleration, but also on many other important physical parameters. The ongoing Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is an example of these new surveys. In this talk I review our theoretical understanding of LSS and the details of the analysis of these measurements. I also describe the cosmological implications of the latest clustering measurements from BOSS, with an emphasis on the problem of understanding cosmic acceleration.

The first galaxies are thought to have started the reionization of the Universe, that is the transformation of the cosmic hydrogen from its initial neutral to its present ionized state that occurred during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. I will review the key physics of reionization by the first galaxies and highlight the computational challenges of simulating the relevant processes, primarily the transport of ionizing photons. I will introduce the radiative transfer method TRAPHIC that we have developed to address these challenges. I will discuss the application of TRAPHIC in zoomed cosmological simulations of the first galaxies and evaluate the prospects for observing these galaxies with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. I will conclude by presenting first results from Aurora, a new suite of simulations to investigate reionization and galaxy formation across a large range of scales.

Twenty years ago, no one convincingly knew the age or the size of the
Universe to within a factor of two. Ten years ago, everyone agreed on
those same two numbers to within 10%. Today, we arguably have brought
the errors down by another factor of two. But that has led to anxiety
rather than euphoria, renewed interest rather than complacency. The
problem is that there are now two independent, competing methods
giving answers of comparable precision and accuracy:
one is a model-based method using the cosmic microwave background
(the CMB), the other is a geometric, parallax-based method using local
measures of distances and expansion velocities. To within about
two-sigma the methods agree.  To within about two-sigma the methods
disagree. And basic physics (a fourth neutrino species, perhaps) hangs
in the balance.

I will discuss how this "tension" arose and how it will soon be
relieved.  A tie-breaker has been identified and developed, and it is
now being worked on from the ground and from space.

Massive early-type galaxies constitute an ideal test bed to probe our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. Their high mass, spheroidal morphology and overly old stellar populations, along with their presence over a wide range of redshifts put to the test our current paradigm of formation via hierarchical growth. In this talk I will review recent work focused on the dark and bright sides of this problem. The former is tackled via gravitational lensing, comparing the dark matter and luminous components out to several effective radii, probing the efficiency of baryon collapse and ejection, and its feedback on the dark matter distribution (adiabatic compression). The bright side of early-type galaxies is approached via photo-spectroscopic analyses of the stellar populations, revealing a complex formation and assembly history with two well-defined phases of growth, and an intriguing connection with the "microphysics" of star formation.

I will discuss how the acoustic oscillations that propagate in the photon-baryon fluid during the first million years of the Universe provide a robust method for measuring the cosmological distance scale. The distance that the sound can travel can be computed to high precision and creates a signature in the late-time clustering of matter that serves as a standard ruler. Galaxy clustering results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey reveal this feature, giving a geometric distance to a redshift of 0.3 and an accurate measurement of Omega_matter. I will review our recent work on the theory and practice of the acoustic oscillation method and our latest cosmology results from SDSS-II. I will then present SDSS-III, which will use the acoustic method to produce 1% distance measurements in order to map the curvature and expansion history of the Universe and measure the evolution of dark energy.

I will review some theoretical ideas in Cosmology different to the standard "Big Bang": the Quasi-steady State model, Plasma Cosmology model, non-cosmological redshifts, alternatives to non-baryonic dark matter and/or dark energy, and others. Some open problems of Cosmology within the standard model will also be summarized.

In the first part of this talk I will present a historical review of the CMB observations, one of the most powerful cosmological probes. Following the first talk of this series, where Jose Alberto described the basic parameters that define the standard cosmological model, I will here summarize the constraints to these parameters that have been derived from these observations. I will also describe the current challenges in this field, in particular the detection of the inflation's B-mode signal through CMB polarization observations, as well as the experiments that have been developed worldwide to this aim, including IAC's QUIJOTE. In the second part, I will focus on the so-called ``missing baryon problem'', i.e. the fact that the half of the expected baryon content of the local universe remains yet undetected. I will describe the theoretical studies that provide hints on where these baryons could be located, and the observational efforts that have been undertaken in this regard.

This is the first talk of a series of four aimed to discuss about Cosmology. Here, I will review the basic concepts of the standard cosmological model, which will be further discussed in the following talks, as well as the observational evidence in support of the Lambda-CDM model. As the subject is very broad, I will focus the discussion on topics related with inflation, dark matter and dark energy. Moreover, I will mainly discuss large scale structure probes.