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Cosmology Solved?

Michael S. Turner

Published 1998-11-27Version 1

For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and point to a grander theory. The best candidate for that grander theory is inflation + cold dark matter; it can extend our understanding of the Universe back to 10^-32 sec. There is now prima facie evidence for the two basic tenets of this new paradigm: flat Universe and scale-invariant spectrum of Gaussian density perturbations, and an avalanche of telling cosmological observations is coming. If inflation + cold dark matter is correct, then there are new, fundamental questions to be answered, most notably the nature of the dark energy that seems to account for 60% of the critical density and how inflation fits into a unified theory of the forces and particles. These are exciting times in cosmology!

Comments: 13 pages LaTeX including 4 eps figures. To be published in Proceedings of the 49th Yamada Conference: Black Holes and Relativistic Astrophysics (Kyoto, Japan; April 1998), ed. N. Sugiyama (Universal Academy Press, Tokyo, Japan)
Categories: astro-ph
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