Six Brief Notes on Contemporary Cosmology

Cosmology is one of the most vibrant areas of research in contemporary Physics. It mobilizes vast theoretical and experimental resources: these materialize in space missions, observational programs that aim to compile astronomical catalogs of an unprecedented scope, and computational and simulation resources that are at the limit of current capabilities in terms of complexity, storage, and data manipulation. This wealth of implications is only possible thanks to the theoretical maturity that Cosmology has achieved in recent decades.

In this brief introduction to Contemporary Cosmology, the most prominent observational and theoretical aspects of the science of the Universe are described and theorized. Starting from the Theory of General Relativity, the book discusses the thermal history of the Universe, the need for a primordial period of accelerated expansion, inflation, the most striking properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the problem of dark matter and dark energy, and the hypothesis of constructing alternative cosmological descriptions based on theories of gravitation other than those based on General Relativity. The topics covered make this book a particularly useful work for an introductory course in Cosmology.