These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with its successes and shortcomings, which will lead to inflationary cosmology as the paradigm for the origin of the global structure of the universe as well as the origin of the spectrum of density perturbations responsible for structure in our local patch. I

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... l present a review of the very rich phenomenology that we have in cosmology today, as well as evidence for the observational revolution that this field is going through, which will provide us, in the next few years, with an accurate determination of the parameters of our standard cosmological model. Q 3 The subscript refers to Luminosity, which characterizes the amount of light emitted by an object. See Eq. (61). 4 The local space-time of a gravitationally bound system is described by the Schwarzschild metric, which is static [6] . º