The ΛCDM standard model, although an excellent parametrization of the present cosmological data, contains two as yet unobserved components, dark matter and dark energy, that constitute more than 95% ...of the Universe. Faced with this unsatisfactory situation, we study an unconventional cosmology, the Dirac-Milne universe, a matter-antimatter symmetric cosmology, in which antimatter is supposed to present a negative active gravitational mass. The main feature of this cosmology is the linear evolution of the scale factor with time, which directly solves the age and horizon problems of a matter-dominated universe. We study the concordance of this model to the cosmological test of type Ia supernovae distance measurements and calculate the theoretical primordial abundances of light elements for this cosmology. We also show that the acoustic scale of the cosmic microwave background naturally emerges at the degree scale despite an open geometry.
Abstract
The variation of galaxy stellar masses and colour types with the distance to projected cosmic filaments are quantified using the precise photometric redshifts of the COSMOS2015 catalogue ...extracted from Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) field (2 deg2). Realistic mock catalogues are also extracted from the lightcone of the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Horizon-AGN. They show that the photometric redshift accuracy of the observed catalogue (σz < 0.015 at M* > 1010M⊙ and z < 0.9) is sufficient to provide two-dimensional (2D) filaments that closely match their projected three-dimensional (3D) counterparts. Transverse stellar mass gradients are measured in projected slices of thickness 75 Mpc between 0.5 < z < 0.9, showing that the most massive galaxies are statistically closer to their neighbouring filament. At fixed stellar mass, passive galaxies are also found closer to their filament, while active star-forming galaxies statistically lie further away. The contributions of nodes and local density are removed from these gradients to highlight the specific role played by the geometry of the filaments. We find that the measured signal does persist after this removal, clearly demonstrating that proximity to a filament is not equivalent to proximity to an overdensity. These findings are in agreement with gradients measured in both 2D and 3D in the Horizon-AGN simulation and those observed in the spectroscopic surveys VIPERS and GAMA (which both rely on the identification of 3D filaments). They are consistent with a picture in which the influence of the geometry of the large-scale environment drives anisotropic tides that impact the assembly history of galaxies, and hence their observed properties.
ABSTRACT We report the discovery of eight new Milky Way companions in of optical imaging data collected during the first year of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Each system is identified as a ...statistically significant over-density of individual stars consistent with the expected isochrone and luminosity function of an old and metal-poor stellar population. The objects span a wide range of absolute magnitudes (MV from to ), physical sizes ( ), and heliocentric distances ( ). Based on the low surface brightnesses, large physical sizes, and/or large Galactocentric distances of these objects, several are likely to be new ultra-faint satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and/or Magellanic Clouds. We introduce a likelihood-based algorithm to search for and characterize stellar over-densities, as well as identify stars with high satellite membership probabilities. We also present completeness estimates for detecting ultra-faint galaxies of varying luminosities, sizes, and heliocentric distances in the first-year DES data.
The Dark Energy Survey Image Processing Pipeline Morganson, E.; Gruendl, R. A.; Menanteau, F. ...
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
07/2018, Volume:
130, Issue:
989
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a five-year optical imaging campaign with the goal of understanding the origin of cosmic acceleration. DES performs a ∼5000 deg2 survey of the southern sky in five ...optical bands (g, r, i, z, Y) to a depth of ∼24th magnitude. Contemporaneously, DES performs a deep, time-domain survey in four optical bands (g, r, i, z) over ∼27 deg2. DES exposures are processed nightly with an evolving data reduction pipeline and evaluated for image quality to determine if they need to be retaken. Difference imaging and transient source detection are also performed in the time domain component nightly. On a bi-annual basis, DES exposures are reprocessed with a refined pipeline and coadded to maximize imaging depth. Here we describe the DES image processing pipeline in support of DES science, as a reference for users of archival DES data, and as a guide for future astronomical surveys.
Cosmic voids are usually identified in spectroscopic galaxy surveys, where 3D information about the large-scale structure of the Universe is available. Although an increasing amount of photometric ...data is being produced, its potential for void studies is limited since photometric redshifts induce line-of-sight position errors of greater than or equal to 50 Mpc h super( -1) which can render many voids undetectable. We present a new void finder designed for photometric surveys, validate it using simulations, and apply it to the high-quality photo-z redMaGiC galaxy sample of the DES Science Verification data. The algorithm works by projecting galaxies into 2D slices and finding voids in the smoothed 2D galaxy density field of the slice. Fixing the line-of-sight size of the slices to be at least twice the photo-z scatter, the number of voids found in simulated spectroscopic and photometric galaxy catalogues is within 20 per cent for all transverse void sizes, and indistinguishable for the largest voids (Rv = 70 Mpc h super( -1)). The positions, radii, and projected galaxy profiles of photometric voids also accurately match the spectroscopic void sample. Applying the algorithm to the DES-SV data in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.8, we identify 87 voids with comoving radii spanning the range 18-120 Mpc h super( -1), and carry out a stacked weak lensing measurement. With a significance of 4.4s, the lensing measurement confirms that the voids are truly underdense in the matter field and hence not a product of Poisson noise, tracer density effects or systematics in the data. It also demonstrates, for the first time in real data, the viability of void lensing studies in photometric surveys.
The correlation between active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and environment provides important clues to AGN fuelling and the relationship of black hole growth to galaxy evolution. In this paper, we analyse ...the fraction of galaxies in clusters hosting AGN as a function of redshift and cluster richness for X-ray-detected AGN associated with clusters of galaxies in Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification data. The present sample includes 33 AGNs with LX > 10 super( 43) erg s super( -1) in non-central, host galaxies with luminosity greater than 0.5L* from a total sample of 432 clusters in the redshift range of 0.1 < z < 0.95. Analysis of the present sample reveals that the AGN fraction in red-sequence cluster members has a strong positive correlation with redshift such that the AGN fraction increases by a factor of ~8 from low to high redshift, and the fraction of cluster galaxies hosting AGN at high redshifts is greater than the low-redshift fraction at 3.6s. In particular, the AGN fraction increases steeply at the highest redshifts in our sample at z > 0.7. This result is in good agreement with previous work and parallels the increase in star formation in cluster galaxies over the same redshift range. However, the AGN fraction in clusters is observed to have no significant correlation with cluster mass. Future analyses with DES Year 1 through Year 3 data will be able to clarify whether AGN activity is correlated to cluster mass and will tightly constrain the relationship between cluster AGN populations and redshift.
Accurate statistical measurement with large imaging surveys has traditionally required throwing away a sizable fraction of the data. This is because most measurements have relied on selecting nearly ...complete samples, where variations in the composition of the galaxy population with seeing, depth, or other survey characteristics are small. We introduce a new measurement method that aims to minimize this wastage, allowing precision measurement for any class of detectable stars or galaxies. We have implemented our proposal in balrog, software which embeds fake objects in real imaging to accurately characterize measurement biases. We demonstrate this technique with an angular clustering measurement using Dark Energy Survey (DES) data. We first show that recovery of our injected galaxies depends on a variety of survey characteristics in the same way as the real data. We then construct a flux-limited sample of the faintest galaxies in DES, chosen specifically for their sensitivity to depth and seeing variations. Using the synthetic galaxies as randoms in the Landy–Szalay estimator suppresses the effects of variable survey selection by at least two orders of magnitude. With this correction, our measured angular clustering is found to be in excellent agreement with that of a matched sample from much deeper, higher resolution space-based Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) imaging; over angular scales of 0
$_{.}^{\circ}$
004 < θ < 0
$_{.}^{\circ}$
2, we find a best-fitting scaling amplitude between the DES and COSMOS measurements of 1.00 ± 0.09. We expect this methodology to be broadly useful for extending measurements’ statistical reach in a variety of upcoming imaging surveys.
We measure the weak lensing shear around galaxy troughs, i.e. the radial alignment of background galaxies relative to underdensities in projections of the foreground galaxy field over a wide range of ...redshift in Science Verification data from the Dark Energy Survey. Our detection of the shear signal is highly significant (... for the smallest angular scales) for troughs with the redshift range z ... 0.2, 0.5 of the projected galaxy field and angular diameters of 10 arcmin...1... These measurements probe the connection between the galaxy, matter density, and convergence fields. By assuming galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density with Poissonian noise, we find agreement of our measurements with predictions in a fiducial ... cold dark matter model. The prediction for the lensing signal on large trough scales is virtually independent of the details of the underlying model for the connection of galaxies and matter. Our comparison of the shear around troughs with that around cylinders with large galaxy counts is consistent with a symmetry between galaxy and matter over- and underdensities. In addition, we measure the two-point angular correlation of troughs with galaxies which, in contrast to the lensing signal, is sensitive to galaxy bias on all scales. The lensing signal of troughs and their clustering with galaxies is therefore a promising probe of the statistical properties of matter underdensities and their connection to the galaxy field. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)
The Dark Energy Camera has captured a large set of images as part of Science Verification (SV) for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The SV footprint covers a large portion of the outer Large Magellanic ...Cloud (LMC), providing photometry 1.5 mag fainter than the main sequence turn-off of the oldest LMC stellar population. We derive geometrical and structural parameters for various stellar populations in the LMC disc. For the distribution of all LMC stars, we find an inclination of i = −38
$_{.}^{\circ}$
14 ± 0
$_{.}^{\circ}$
08 (near side in the north) and a position angle for the line of nodes of θ0 = 129
$_{.}^{\circ}$
51 ± 0
$_{.}^{\circ}$
17. We find that stars younger than ∼4 Gyr are more centrally concentrated than older stars. Fitting a projected exponential disc shows that the scale radius of the old populations is R
>4 Gyr = 1.41 ± 0.01 kpc, while the younger population has R
<4 Gyr = 0.72 ± 0.01 kpc. However, the spatial distribution of the younger population deviates significantly from the projected exponential disc model. The distribution of old stars suggests a large truncation radius of R
t = 13.5 ± 0.8 kpc. If this truncation is dominated by the tidal field of the Galaxy, we find that the LMC is
${\simeq } 24^{+9}_{-6}$
times less massive than the encircled Galactic mass. By measuring the Red Clump peak magnitude and comparing with the best-fitting LMC disc model, we find that the LMC disc is warped and thicker in the outer regions north of the LMC centre. Our findings may either be interpreted as a warped and flared disc in the LMC outskirts, or as evidence of a spheroidal halo component.
We detect the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect with a statistical significance of 4.2σ by combining a cluster catalogue derived from the first year data of the Dark Energy Survey with cosmic ...microwave background temperature maps from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Survey. This measurement is performed with a differential statistic that isolates the pairwise kSZ signal, providing the first detection of the large-scale, pairwise motion of clusters using redshifts derived from photometric data. By fitting the pairwise kSZ signal to a theoretical template, we measure the average central optical depth of the cluster sample,
$\bar{\tau }_e = (3.75 \pm 0.89)\times 10^{-3}$
. We compare the extracted signal to realistic simulations and find good agreement with respect to the signal to noise, the constraint on
$\bar{\tau }_e$
, and the corresponding gas fraction. High-precision measurements of the pairwise kSZ signal with future data will be able to place constraints on the baryonic physics of galaxy clusters, and could be used to probe gravity on scales ≳100 Mpc.