A combination of recent observational results has given rise to what is currently known as the dark energy problem. Although several possible candidates have been extensively discussed in the literature to date the nature of this dark energy component is not well understood at present. In this paper we investigate some cosmological implications of another dark energy candidate: an exotic fluid known as the Chaplygin gas, which is characterized by an equation of state p = −A/ρ, where A is a positive constant. By assuming a flat scenario driven by non-relativistic matter plus a Chaplygin gas dark energy we study the influence of such a component on the statistical properties of gravitational lenses. A comparison between the predicted age of the universe and the latest age estimates of globular clusters is also included and the results briefly discussed. In general, we find that the behavior of this class of models may be interpreted as an intermediary case between the standard and ΛCDM scenarios.

Linearly coasting cosmology is comfortably concordant with a host of cosmological observations. It is surprisingly an excellent fit to SNe Ia observations and constraints arising from age of old quasars. In this article we highlight the overall viability of an open linear coasting cosmological model. The model is consistent with the latest SNe Ia "gold" sample and accommodates a very old high-redshift quasar, which the standard cold-dark model fails to do.

We study the f (R) theory of gravity using metric approach. In particular we investigate the recently proposed model by Hu-Sawicki, Appleby − Battye and Starobinsky. In this model, the cosmological constant is zero in flat space time. The model passes both the Solar system and the laboratory tests. But the model parameters need to be fine tuned to avoid the finite time singularity recently pointed in the literature. We check the concordance of this model with the H(z) and baryon acoustic oscillation data. We find that the model resembles the ΛCDM at high redshift. However, for some parameter values there are variations in the expansion history of the universe at low redshift.

A strictly linear evolution of the cosmological expansion scale factor is a characteristic feature in several classes of alternative gravity theories as also in the standard (big-bang) model with specially chosen equations of state of matter. Such an evolution has no free parameters as far as the classical cosmological tests are concerned and should therefore be easily falsifiable. In this article we demonstrate how such models present very good fits to the current supernovae 1a data. We discuss the overall viability of such models. *

Motivated by recent developments in particle physics and cosmology, there has been growing interest in an unified description of dark matter and dark energy scenarios. In this paper we explore observational constraints from age estimates of high-$z$ objects on cosmological models dominated by an exotic fluid with equation of state $p = -A/\rho^{\alpha}$ (the so-called generalized Chaplygin gas) which has the interesting feature of interpolating between non-relativistic matter and negative-pressure dark energy regimes. As a general result we find that, if the age estimates of these objects are correct, they impose very restrictive limits on some of these scenarios.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.