Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant
- 30 November 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 59 (22) , 2607-2610
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.59.2607
Abstract
In recent cosmological models, there is an "anthropic" upper bound on the cosmological constant . It is argued here that in universes that do not recollapse, the only such bound on is that it should not be so large as to prevent the formation of gravitationally bound states. It turns out that the bound is quite large. A cosmological constant that is within 1 or 2 orders of magnitude of its upper bound would help with the missing-mass and age problems, but may be ruled out by galaxy number counts. If so, we may conclude that anthropic considerations do not explain the smallness of the cosmological constant.
Keywords
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