SPA6311 Physical Cosmology, Spring 2016

Exercise sheet 4 Dr. K. Malik

These questions are designed to help you understand the material covered in the lectures.
Exercise sheets will typically be made available online before the Thursday lecture. Please
hand the solutions in by the following Thursday, 1600. Put your full name and student
number on the top of your solutions.

1. a) Find an up to date value for Hubble’s constant, H0 , on the web (e.g. from the
latest Planck data release).
b) Use H0 to find an approximate value for the proper distance dp today for which
the recession speed of an object is larger than the speed of light.
[30 pts.]

2. Assume an open, curvature dominated FRW universe.

a) Show that the scale factor evolves as

 
t
a(t) = ,
t0

assuming that the scale factor today is equal to unity and was zero initially.
Find the relation of t0 to the curvature constant.
b) Show that the time a light signal was emitted, te , is related to redshift by

H0−1
te = .
1+z

c) Show that the proper distance to a light source, emitting at te , to us is

 
t0
dp (t0 ) = ct0 ln .
te

Give dp (t0 ) in terms of c, H0 and z.

[50 pts.]

3. Suppose we live in a closed universe (k > 0), which will recollapse at some time in
the future. What will the temperature be when the universe has gone through its
maximum size and then shrunk back to its present size? Hint: this can be answered
nearly without calculation.

[20 pts.]