The flatness problem as a natural cosmological phenomenon
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Date
2008Author
Maumba, G O
Monyonko, N M
Malo, J O
Type
ArticleLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
An interplay between elementary particle interactions at very high energies
and the expansion of the Universe is studied in the context of the inflationary
model to find a possible explanation for an observed flatness which remains a
cosmological puzzle. As is well known from observation, the universe is at
least fairly flat implying that the relative energy density is almost unity. This
value of energy is extrapolated from the matter dominated and the radiation
dominated phases of the false unbroken grand unified vacua separately, to the
true vacuum. This present relative energy density of order unity must have
been of order 10-61 at the Planck time of 10-43 seconds that leads to the gravity
breaking from strong and weak interactions. A very fine tuning of one part in
10-61 is needed to keep the relative energy density close to unity over a very
longtime to ensure that the universe is very old as observed. This in itself does
not ensure that the curvature term in the Friedman field equations of motion is
unimportant. These equations are solved separately, for the open, closed and
flat universes corresponding to the value of the curvature term being minus
one, zero and plus one. Analysis of these solutions indicates that the open and
closed solutions converge to the flat universe solution. A power series
expansion done for the relative energy density in the case of open and closed
universes shows that even a first order correction is negligible and in this case
the hyperbolic solutions become exponential which is the flat universe result.
The flatness problem is then seen as a natural phenomenon in an inflationary
Citation
Maumba,G.O., Monyonko, N.M., Malo,J.O.;2008.The flatness problem as a natural cosmological phenomenon_ International Journal of Pure and Applied Physics (IJPAP) New Delhi, India. (Vol.5 No.4 2008 P161-169.)Publisher
University of Nairobi Department of physics