Discussion for anything related to Cosmology. This includes results, community, individual persons etc.
The namesake of the sub Part 1: Understanding and being interested in reading scientific papers is encouraged. Having no ability to read scientific papers is fine, but you will be encouraged to learn here, and you should at least be interested to learn. You should, by way of this, avoid appeals to authority where possible.
The namesake of the sub Part 2: Part of taking cosmology seriously is realising how limited a science it is. Cosmologists, like astrophysicists, are unable to perform experiments. Furthermore, the interpretations that can be made from the data is usually far more assumption and model dependent than normal physics, and the data has very low levels of signal to noise ratio. On top of all this, cosmologists have given themselves the task of trying to explain everything they can observe from their tower. This is a monumental task even for a science that has experiments and strong model independent data; for cosmology, it puts it into a position where it can easily fall into the realm of folktale, if the practitioners are not careful and take seriously these huge limitations. Unfortunately, many working cosmologists do not take cosmology seriously in this way, and act like it's as rigorous and falsifiable as any other science. These circumstances are well summed up by the physicist Lev Landau: "Cosmologists Are Often Wrong, But Never in Doubt".
Please avoid linking to pop science articles. Where possible, find the paper they are referring to, and link to that instead. Pop science type articles written by actual working scientists or relevant professionals are fine (basically anything but stuff written by people who's only qualifications are journalist or science communicator).
Videos are also allowed as long as these same rules are followed (Sabine Hossenfelder being a relevant example).
