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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 ...
The Einstein field equation is often written as + =, with a so-called cosmological constant term.However, it is possible to move this term to the right hand side and absorb it into the stress–energy tensor, so that the cosmological constant term becomes just another contribution to the stress–energy tensor.
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.
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 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 ...
For the Lambda-CDM model with a positive cosmological constant (as observed), the universe is predicted to expand forever regardless of whether the total density is slightly above or below the critical density; though other outcomes are possible in extended models where the dark energy is not constant but actually time-dependent. [citation needed]
Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) is a cosmological model in the framework of general relativity and proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. [1] [2] [3] In CCC, the universe iterates through infinite cycles, with the future timelike infinity (i.e. the latest end of any possible timescale evaluated for any point in space) of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang ...
A free (=) scalar field has =, and one with vanishing kinetic energy is equivalent to a cosmological constant: =. Any equation of state in between, but not crossing the w = − 1 {\displaystyle w=-1} barrier known as the Phantom Divide Line (PDL), [ 2 ] is achievable, which makes scalar fields useful models for many phenomena in cosmology.