Astrophysical implications of the Asymptotic Safety Scenario in Quantum Gravity

In recent years it has emerged that the high energy behavior of gravity could be governed by an ultraviolet non-Gaussian fixed point of the (dimensionless) Newton's constant, whose behavior at high energy is thus {\it antiscreened}. This phenomenon has several astrophysical implications. In particular in this article recent works on renormalization group improved cosmologies based upon a renormalization group trajectory of Quantum Einstein Gravity with realistic parameter values will be reviewed. It will be argued that quantum effects can account for the entire entropy of the present Universe in the massless sector and give rise to a phase of inflationary expansion. Moreover the prediction for the final state of the black hole evaporation is a Planck size remnant which is formed in an infinite time.
Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. Invited talk at Workshop on Continuum and Lattice Approaches to Quantum Gravity. Sept. 2008, Brighton UK. To appear in the Proceedings