Cosmology

Abstract

Cosmology is a science studying the structure and evolution of the whole Universe. Research in cosmology tries to answer questions such as: How large and how old is the Universe? How was it born? How is matter distributed? How were the elements formed? What will be the future of the Universe?

After the demise of the Aristotelian world picture, it took hundreds of years of astronomical observations and physical theories to reach a level at which a satisfactory modern scientific picture of the physical universe could be formed. The decisive steps in the development were the clarification of the nature of the galaxies in the 1920’s and the general theory of relativity, which gives a basis for theoretical research of the universe, developed by Einstein in the 1910’s. Yet, just a few decades ago there was a lot of room for armwaiving and all kinds of speculations. Only recently the observations made with satellites have given reasonably precise values for some parameters and some alternative models could be excluded. The central tenet of modern cosmology is the model of the expanding universe, getting all the time more supporting observational evidence.