Overview of Cosmology---clear brief online text

A good up-to-date introduction to cosmology.

For undergraduates in the CERN Summer Students program

Author Julien Lesgourges organizes it clearly and simply---with lots of diagrams.

I added it to the A&C Reference library that Alexa has been organizing

recently, a stickythread for useful links. This is a keeper, might even want to print it out.

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http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0409426

An overview of Cosmology

Julien Lesgourgues

Lecture notes for the Summer Students Programme of CERN (2002-2004). 62 pages, 30 figures. Very basic conceptual introduction to Cosmology, aimed at undergraduate students with no previous knowledge of General Relativity

"While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some fascinating questions like: is the Universe static or expanding ? How old is it and what will be its future evolution ? Is it flat, open or closed ? Of what type of matter is it composed ? How did structures like galaxies form ? In this course, we will try to give an overview of these questions, and of the partial answers that can be given today. In the first chapter, we will introduce some fundamental concepts, in particular from General Relativity. In the second chapter, we will apply these concepts to the real Universe and deal with concrete results, observations, and testable predictions."

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