Abstract
Having studied our Milky Way Galaxy, various other galaxies of the most diverse kinds, and the arrangement of the galaxies into clusters and superclusters, we now turn to the Universe as a whole, its spatial structure and its evolution in time. We begin, in Sect. 13.1, with E. Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the Universe, and then discuss the possible cosmological models on the basis of the theory of General Relativity. Now, in order to determine the correct model of our Universe and its parameters, we must make use of a wide variety of different observations. To this end, we investigate somewhat more carefully the propagation of electromagnetic radiation over cosmic distances and describe the isotropic background radiation at 3 K, discovered by A.A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson, and the hot, radiation-dominated initial state of the Universe where the lightest elements, in particular helium, were produced (Sect. 13.2). Finally, in Sect. 13.3, we give an overview of the most important relevant facts in order to arrive at a picture of the evolution of the Universe from its earliest stages, which are closely connected with our knowledge of the fundamental physical interactions, through the production of the 3 K radiation, on to the formation of the galaxies and galaxy clusters, and finally to the present-day state of the cosmos.
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Unsöld, A., Baschek, B. (2002). Cosmology: the Cosmos as a Whole. In: The New Cosmos. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04356-1_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04356-1_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08746-2
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