Future directions in cosmology

Cosmology is entering a very exciting time in its history, when a wealth of cutting-edge experiments are all starting to collect data, or about to. These experiments aim at addressing some of the most intriguing questions in fundamental physics, such as what is the nature of dark matter, is dark energy a cosmological constant or a varying field, what are the masses of the neutrinos and more. While Λ-CDM has emerged as a simple model that is consistent with most of the current datasets, we are starting to see some interesting deviations that deserve further exploration. This contribution provides an overview of upcoming projects and the science opportunities they will allow. In particular, we recall and comment on the DESI year-1 BAO constraints and their implications for dark energy. We put some of the most recent results and outstanding questions into the perspective of the forthcoming observational programme.

This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Challenging the standard cosmological model’.