Abstract
Cosmology seeks to answer the rather grandiose question “What is the universe?” After about half a century of being mainly a theoretical and mathematical subject cosmology entered the mainstream of physics only in the last half of the twentieth century thanks to a viable theoretical structure provided by general relativity and diverse observations of distant galaxies and measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. In this chapter we begin our study of cosmology by applying general relativity to the entire universe, in which the source of gravity is taken to be a cosmic fluid. The gravitational field equations naturally allow for one component of the fluid to be the “dark energy” that has been found by observation to be the dominant component.
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Adler, R.J. (2021). The Einstein Field Equations for Cosmology. In: General Relativity and Cosmology. Graduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61574-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61574-1_12
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