ENGLISH

Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem

By D. W. Sciama

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
1994
ISBN
0521438489, 9780521438483
LCC
QB791.3 .S33 1993
Open Library ID
OL1201808M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
7 MB (6975178 bytes)
Series
Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics
Pages
244\241
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

This book shows how modern cosmology and astronomy have led to the need to introduce dark matter in the universe to account for mass. Some of this dark matter is in the familiar form of protons, electrons and neutrons, but most of it must have a more exotic form. The favored, but not the only, possibility is neutrinos of non-zero rest mass, pair-created in the hot big bang and surviving to the present day. After a review of modern cosmology, this book gives a detailed account of the author's recent theory in which these neutrinos decay into photons that are the main ionizing agents in hydrogen and nitrogen in the interstellar and intergalactic medium. This theory, though speculative, explains a number of rather different puzzling phenomena in astronomy and cosmology in a unified way and predicts values of various important quantities such as the mass of the decaying neutrino and the Hubble constant.

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