Astrophysics

Some observations such as those presented in Walker et al. show that the observed entropy profiles of the intra-cluster medium (ICM) deviate from the power-law prediction of adiabatic simulations. This implies that non-gravitational processes, which are absent in the simulations, may be important in the evolution of the ICM, and by quantifying the deviation, we may be able to estimate the feedback energy in the ICM and use it as a probe of the non-gravitational processes. To address this issue we calculate the ICM entropy profiles in a sample of 47 galaxy clusters and groups, which have been observed out to at least ??r 500 with Chandra, XMM-Newton and/or Suzaku, by constructing a physical model to incorporate the effects of both gravity and non-gravitational processes to fit the observed gas temperature and surface brightness profiles via Bayesian statistics. After carefully evaluating the effects of systematic errors, we find that the gas entropy profiles derived with best-fit results of our model are consistent with the simulation-predicted power-law profile near the virial radius, while the flattened profiles reported previously can be explained by introducing the gas clumping effect, the existence of which is confirmed in 19 luminous targets in our sample. We calculate the total feedback energy per particle and find that it decreases from ??0 keV at the center to about zero at ??.35 r 200 and is consistent with zero outside ??.35 r 200 , implying the upper limit of the feedback efficiency ??.02 for the super-massive black holes hosted in the brightest cluster galaxies.

We study the large-scale anisotropy of the Universe by measuring the dipole in the angular distribution of a flux-limited, all-sky sample of 1.36 million quasars observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). This sample is derived from the new CatWISE2020 catalog, which contains deep photometric measurements at 3.4 and 4.6 μ m from the cryogenic, post-cryogenic, and reactivation phases of the WISE mission. While the direction of the dipole in the quasar sky is similar to that of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), its amplitude is over twice as large as expected, rejecting the canonical, exclusively kinematic interpretation of the CMB dipole with a p-value of 5× 10 −7 ( 4.9σ for a normal distribution, one-sided), the highest significance achieved to date in such studies. Our results are in conflict with the cosmological principle, a foundational assumption of the concordance Λ CDM model.

Galaxy redshift surveys are one of the key probes in modern cosmology. In the data analysis of galaxy surveys, the precision of the statistical measurement is primarily limited by the cosmic variance on large scales. Fortunately, this limitation can in principle be evaded by observing multiple types of biased tracers. In this brief review, we present the idea of the multi-tracer method, outline key steps in the data analysis, and show several worked examples based on the GAMA, BOSS and eBOSS galaxy surveys.

We characterise the thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in ten redshift bins in the redshift range 2≤z≤4 with a sample of 103 high resolution, high S/N Ly α forest spectra using four different flux distribution statistics. Our measurements are calibrated with mock spectra from a large suite of hydrodynamical simulations post-processed with our thermal IGM evolution code CITE, finely sampling amplitude and slope of the expected temperature-density relation. The thermal parameters inferred from our measurements of the flux power spectrum, Doppler parameter distribution, as well as wavelet and curvature statistics agree well within their respective errors and all clearly show the peak in temperature and minimum in slope of the temperature density relation expected from HeII reionization. Combining our measurements from the different flux statistics gives T 0 =(14750±1322) K for the peak temperature at mean density and a corresponding minimum slope γ=1.225±0.120 . The peak in the temperature evolution occurs at z≈3 , in agreement with previous measurements that had suggested the presence of such a peak, albeit with a large scatter. Using CITE, we also calculate the thermal state of the IGM predicted by five widely used (spatially homogeneous) UV-background models. The rather rapid thermal evolution inferred by our measurements is well reproduced by two of the models, if we assume (physically well motivated) non-equilibrium evolution with photo-heating rates that are reduced by a moderate factor of ∼0.7−0.8 . The other three models predict HeII reionization to be more extended with a somewhat earlier as well as higher temperature peak than our measurements suggest.

We show that the impact of energy injection by dark matter annihilation on the cosmic microwave background power spectra can be apprehended via a residual likelihood map. By resorting to convolutional neural networks that can fully discover the underlying pattern of the map, we propose a novel way of constraining dark matter annihilation based on the Planck 2018 data. We demonstrate that the trained neural network can efficiently predict the likelihood and accurately place bounds on the annihilation cross-section in a model-independent fashion. The machinery will be made public in the near future.

We suggest a crucial direct-observational test for measuring distinction between the standard Λ CDM model and recently proposed phantom dark energy positive curvature cosmological model. The test is based on the fundamental distance--flux--redshift relation for general Friedmann models. It does not depend on the CMBR data, on the large-scale structure growth models, and also on the value of the Hubble constant H 0 . Our crucial test can be performed by future gamma-ray burst observations with THESEUS space mission and by using gravitational-wave standard siren observations with modern advanced LIGO--Virgo and also forthcoming LISA detectors.

Sterile neutrinos with masses in the keV range are well-motivated extensions to the Standard Model that could explain the observed neutrino masses while also making up the dark matter (DM) of the Universe. If sterile neutrinos are DM then they may slowly decay into active neutrinos and photons, giving rise to the possibility of their detection through narrow spectral features in astrophysical X-ray data sets. In this work, we perform the most sensitive search to date for this and other decaying DM scenarios across the mass range from 5 to 16 keV using archival XMM-Newton data. We reduce 547 Ms of data from both the MOS and PN instruments using observations taken across the full sky and then use this data to search for evidence of DM decay in the ambient halo of the Milky Way. We determine the instrumental and astrophysical baselines with data taken far away from the Galactic Center, and use Gaussian Process modeling to capture additional continuum background contributions. No evidence is found for unassociated X-ray lines, leading us to produce the strongest constraints to date on decaying DM in this mass range.

Aims. The main purpose of this work is to provide a method to derive tabulated observational constraints on the halo mass function (HMF) by studying the magnification bias effect on high-redshift submillimeter galaxies. Under the assumption of universality, we parametrize the HMF according to two traditional models, namely the Sheth and Tormen (ST) and Tinker fits and assess their performance in explaining the measured data within the {\Lambda} cold dark matter ({\Lambda}CDM) model. We also study the potential influence of the halo occupation distribution (HOD) parameters in this analysis and discuss two important aspects regarding the HMF parametrization. Methods. We measure the cross-correlation function between a foreground sample of GAMA galaxies with redshifts in the range 0.2<z<0.8 and a background sample of H-ATLAS galaxies with redshifts in the range 1.2<z<4.0 and carry out an MCMC algorithm to check this observable against its mathematical prediction within the halo model formalism. Results. If all HMF parameters are assumed to be positive, the ST fit only seems to fully explain the measurements by forcing the mean number of satellite galaxies in a halo to increase substantially from its prior mean value. The Tinker fit, on the other hand, provides a robust description of the data without relevant changes in the HOD parameters, but with some dependence on the prior range of two of its parameters. When the normalization condition for the HMF is dropped and we allow negative values of the p 1 parameter in the ST fit, all the involved parameters are better determined, unlike the previous models, thus deriving the most general HMF constraints. While all cases are in agreement with the traditional fits within the uncertainties, the last one hints at a slightly higher number of halos at intermediate and high masses, raising the important point of the allowed parameter range.

Models involving an interaction between the Dark Matter and the Dark Energy sectors have been proposed to alleviate the long standing Hubble constant tension. In this paper we analyze whether the constraints and potential hints obtained for these interacting models remain unchanged when using simulated Planck data. Interestingly, our simulations indicate that a dangerous fake detection for a non-zero interaction among the Dark Matter and the Dark Energy fluids could arise when dealing with current CMB Planck measurements alone. The very same hypothesis is tested against future CMB observations, finding that only cosmic variance limited polarization experiments, such as PICO or PRISM, could be able to break the existing parameter degeneracies and provide reliable cosmological constraints. This paper underlines the extreme importance of confronting the results arising from data analyses with those obtained with simulations when extracting cosmological limits within exotic cosmological scenarios.

We compute the expected sensitivity on measurements of optical depth to reionization for a ground-based experiment at Teide Observatory. We simulate polarized partial sky maps for the GroundBIRD experiment at the frequencies 145 and 220 GHz. We perform fits for the simulated maps with our pixel-based likelihood to extract the optical depth to reionization. The noise levels of polarization maps are estimated as 110 μK arcmin and 780 μK arcmin for 145 and 220 GHz, respectively, by assuming a three-year observing campaign and sky coverages of 0.537 for 145 GHz and 0.462 for 220 GHz. Our sensitivities for the optical depth to reionization are found to be ? ? =0.030 with the simulated GroundBIRD maps, and ? ? =0.012 by combining with the simulated QUIJOTE maps at 11, 13, 17, 19, 30, and 40 GHz.