A Taste of Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper provides an accessible overview of cosmology, covering the standard model, key observations like the cosmic microwave background, and topics such as inflation and dark energy, highlighting recent successes and future outlooks.

Contribution

It offers a non-technical introduction to cosmology, summarizing essential concepts, observations, and developments without detailed derivations or comprehensive historical context.

Findings

Successes of the standard cosmological model in recent years

Role of cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure observations

Discussion of inflation, dark energy, and future prospects

Abstract

This is the summary of two lectures that aim to give an overview of cosmology. I will not try to be too rigorous in derivations, nor to give a full historical overview. The idea is to provide a "taste" of cosmology and some of the interesting topics it covers. The standard cosmological model is presented and I highlight the successes of cosmology over the past decade or so. Keys to the development of the standard cosmological model are observations of the cosmic microwave background and of large-scale structure, which are introduced. Inflation and dark energy and the outlook for the future are also discussed. Slides from the lectures are available from the school website: physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/CLASHEP/CLASHEP2011/.