Friday, November 13, 2015

November 20, 2015 3:30PM BPB-207. Bharat Ratra. Dark Energy: constant or time variable? (... and other open questions).

Experiments and observations over the last decade and a half have persuaded cosmologists that (as yet undetected) dark energy is by far the main component of the energy budget of the universe. I review a few simple dark energy models and compare their predictions to observational data, to derive dark energy model-parameter constraints and to test consistency of different data sets. I conclude with a list of open cosmological questions.