The Quest for the Cosmological Parameters

Abstract

The following review presents an attempt to discuss various issues of current interest in Observational Cosmology, the selection of which as well as the emphasis given, reflects my own preference and biases. After presenting some Cosmological basics, for which I was aided by excellent text-books, I emphasize on attempts to determine some of the important cosmological parameters; the Hubble constant, the curvature and total mass content of the Universe. The outcome of these very recent studies is that the "concordance" model, that fits the majority of observations, is that with Omega_m+ Omega_Lambda=1, Omega_Lambda ~ 0.7, Ho ~ 70 km/sec Mpc, Omega_B ~ 0.04 and spectral index of primordial fluctuation spectrum, the inflationary value n ~ 1. I apologise before hand for the many important works that I may have omitted.