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The cosmological constant was originally introduced in Einstein's 1917 paper entitled “The cosmological considerations in the General Theory of Reality”. [2] Einstein included the cosmological constant as a term in his field equations for general relativity because he was dissatisfied that otherwise his equations did not allow for a static universe: gravity would cause a universe that was ...
a cosmological constant, denoted by lambda (Λ), associated with dark energy; the postulated cold dark matter, denoted by CDM; ordinary matter. It is the current standard model of Big Bang cosmology, [1] as it is the simplest model that provides a reasonably good account of: the existence and structure of the cosmic microwave background;
In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the substantial disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and the much larger theoretical value of zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory.
In general relativity, a lambdavacuum solution is an exact solution to the Einstein field equation in which the only term in the stress–energy tensor is a cosmological constant term. This can be interpreted physically as a kind of classical approximation to a nonzero vacuum energy .
For many years the cosmological constant was almost universally assumed to be zero. More recent astronomical observations have shown an accelerating expansion of the universe, and to explain this a positive value of Λ is needed. [18] [19] The effect of the cosmological constant is negligible at the scale of a galaxy or smaller.
Moreover, it is the unique dimensionality that can afford a "stable" gas sphere with a "positive" cosmological constant. However, a self-gravitating gas cannot be stably bound if the mass sphere is larger than ~10 21 solar masses, due to the small positivity of the cosmological constant observed. [57]
In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the spatial distribution of matter in the universe is uniformly isotropic and homogeneous when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act equally throughout the universe on a large scale, and should, therefore, produce no observable inequalities in the large-scale structuring over the course ...
Einstein's static universe is closed (i.e. has hyperspherical topology and positive spatial curvature), and contains uniform dust and a positive cosmological constant with value precisely = /, where is Newtonian gravitational constant, is the energy density of the matter in the universe and is the speed of light.