The current status of observational cosmology

Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Tarun Souradeep

Published 2004-09-06, updated 2004-09-09Version 2

Observational cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation. The transition to precision cosmology has been spearheaded by measurements of the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over the past decade. Observations of the large scale structure in the distribution of galaxies, high red-shift supernova, have provided the required complementary information. We review the current status of cosmological parameter estimates from joint analysis of CMB anisotropy and large scale structure (LSS) data. We also sound a note of caution on overstating the successes achieved thus far.