Abstract
The largest structures in the cosmic web probe the dynamical nature of dark energy through their integrated Sachs–Wolfe imprints. In the strength of the signal, typical cosmic voids have ...shown good consistency with expectation AISW = ΔTdata/ΔTtheory = 1, given the substantial cosmic variance. Discordantly, large-scale hills in the gravitational potential, or supervoids, have shown excess signals. In this study, we mapped out 87 new supervoids in the total 5000 deg2 footprint of the Dark Energy Survey at 0.2 < $z$ < 0.9 to probe these anomalous claims. We found an excess imprinted profile with AISW ≈ 4.1 ± 2.0 amplitude. The combination with independent BOSS data reveals an ISW imprint of supervoids at the 3.3σ significance level with an enhanced AISW ≈ 5.2 ± 1.6 amplitude. The tension with ΛCDM predictions is equivalent to 2.6σ and remains unexplained.
Euclid
is poised to survey galaxies across a cosmological volume of unprecedented size, providing observations of more than a billion objects distributed over a third of the full sky. Approximately ...20 million of these galaxies will have their spectroscopy available, allowing us to map the three-dimensional large-scale structure of the Universe in great detail. This paper investigates prospects for the detection of cosmic voids therein and the unique benefit they provide for cosmological studies. In particular, we study the imprints of dynamic (redshift-space) and geometric (Alcock–Paczynski) distortions of average void shapes and their constraining power on the growth of structure and cosmological distance ratios. To this end, we made use of the Flagship mock catalog, a state-of-the-art simulation of the data expected to be observed with
Euclid
. We arranged the data into four adjacent redshift bins, each of which contains about 11 000 voids and we estimated the stacked void-galaxy cross-correlation function in every bin. Fitting a linear-theory model to the data, we obtained constraints on
f
/
b
and
D
M
H
, where
f
is the linear growth rate of density fluctuations,
b
the galaxy bias,
D
M
the comoving angular diameter distance, and
H
the Hubble rate. In addition, we marginalized over two nuisance parameters included in our model to account for unknown systematic effects in the analysis. With this approach,
Euclid
will be able to reach a relative precision of about 4% on measurements of
f
/
b
and 0.5% on
D
M
H
in each redshift bin. Better modeling or calibration of the nuisance parameters may further increase this precision to 1% and 0.4%, respectively. Our results show that the exploitation of cosmic voids in
Euclid
will provide competitive constraints on cosmology even as a stand-alone probe. For example, the equation-of-state parameter,
w
, for dark energy will be measured with a precision of about 10%, consistent with previous more approximate forecasts.
ABSTRACT
The Cold Spot is a puzzling large-scale feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature maps and its origin has been subject to active debate. As an important foreground structure at ...low redshift, the Eridanus supervoid was recently detected, but it was subsequently determined that, assuming the standard ΛCDM model, only about 10–20 per cent of the observed temperature depression can be accounted for via its Integrated Sachs–Wolfe imprint. However, R ≳ 100 h−1Mpc supervoids elsewhere in the sky have shown ISW imprints AISW ≈ 5.2 ± 1.6 times stronger than expected from ΛCDM (AISW = 1), which warrants further inspection. Using the Year-3 redMaGiC catalogue of luminous red galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey, here we confirm the detection of the Eridanus supervoid as a significant underdensity in the Cold Spot’s direction at z < 0.2. We also show, with S/N ≳ 5 significance, that the Eridanus supervoid appears as the most prominent large-scale underdensity in the dark matter mass maps that we reconstructed from DES Year-3 gravitational lensing data. While we report no significant anomalies, an interesting aspect is that the amplitude of the lensing signal from the Eridanus supervoid at the Cold Spot centre is about 30 per cent lower than expected from similar peaks found in N-body simulations based on the standard ΛCDM model with parameters Ωm = 0.279 and σ8 = 0.82. Overall, our results confirm the causal relation between these individually rare structures in the cosmic web and in the CMB, motivating more detailed future surveys in the Cold Spot region.
The
Euclid
mission – with its spectroscopic galaxy survey covering a sky area over 15 000 deg
2
in the redshift range 0.9 <
z
< 1.8 – will provide a sample of tens of thousands of cosmic voids. ...This paper thoroughly explores for the first time the constraining power of the void size function on the properties of dark energy (DE) from a survey mock catalogue, the official
Euclid
Flagship simulation. We identified voids in the Flagship light-cone, which closely matches the features of the upcoming
Euclid
spectroscopic data set. We modelled the void size function considering a state-of-the art methodology: we relied on the volume-conserving (Vdn) model, a modification of the popular Sheth & van de Weygaert model for void number counts, extended by means of a linear function of the large-scale galaxy bias. We found an excellent agreement between model predictions and measured mock void number counts. We computed updated forecasts for the
Euclid
mission on DE from the void size function and provided reliable void number estimates to serve as a basis for further forecasts of cosmological applications using voids. We analysed two different cosmological models for DE: the first described by a constant DE equation of state parameter,
w
, and the second by a dynamic equation of state with coefficients
w
0
and
w
a
. We forecast 1
σ
errors on
w
lower than 10% and we estimated an expected figure of merit (FoM) for the dynamical DE scenario FoM
w
0
,
w
a
= 17 when considering only the neutrino mass as additional free parameter of the model. The analysis is based on conservative assumptions to ensure full robustness, and is a pathfinder for future enhancements of the technique. Our results showcase the impressive constraining power of the void size function from the
Euclid
spectroscopic sample, both as a stand-alone probe, and to be combined with other
Euclid
cosmological probes.
ABSTRACT
Cosmic voids gravitationally lens the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, resulting in a distinct imprint on degree scales. We use the simulated CMB lensing convergence map from the ...Marenostrum Institut de Ciencias de l’Espai (MICE) N-body simulation to calibrate our detection strategy for a given void definition and galaxy tracer density. We then identify cosmic voids in Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 data and stack the Planck 2015 lensing convergence map on their locations, probing the consistency of simulated and observed void lensing signals. When fixing the shape of the stacked convergence profile to that calibrated from simulations, we find imprints at the 3σ significance level for various analysis choices. The best measurement strategies based on the MICE calibration process yield S/N ≈ 4 for DES Y1, and the best-fitting amplitude recovered from the data is consistent with expectations from MICE (A ≈ 1). Given these results as well as the agreement between them and N-body simulations, we conclude that the previously reported excess integrated Sachs–Wolfe (ISW) signal associated with cosmic voids in DES Y1 has no counterpart in the Planck CMB lensing map.
ABSTRACT
The CMB lensing signal from cosmic voids and superclusters probes the growth of structure in the low-redshift cosmic web. In this analysis, we cross-correlated the Planck CMB lensing map ...with voids detected in the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 (Y3) data set (∼5000 deg2), expanding on previous measurements that used Y1 catalogues (∼1300 deg2). Given the increased statistical power compared to Y1 data, we report a 6.6σ detection of negative CMB convergence (κ) imprints using approximately 3600 voids detected from a redMaGiC luminous red galaxy sample. However, the measured signal is lower than expected from the MICE N-body simulation that is based on the ΛCDM model (parameters Ωm = 0.25, σ8 = 0.8), and the discrepancy is associated mostly with the void centre region. Considering the full void lensing profile, we fit an amplitude $A_{\kappa }=\kappa _{{\rm DES}}/\kappa _{{\rm MICE}}$ to a simulation-based template with fixed shape and found a moderate 2σ deviation in the signal with Aκ ≈ 0.79 ± 0.12. We also examined the WebSky simulation that is based on a Planck 2018 ΛCDM cosmology, but the results were even less consistent given the slightly higher matter density fluctuations than in MICE. We then identified superclusters in the DES and the MICE catalogues, and detected their imprints at the 8.4σ level; again with a lower-than-expected Aκ = 0.84 ± 0.10 amplitude. The combination of voids and superclusters yields a 10.3σ detection with an Aκ = 0.82 ± 0.08 constraint on the CMB lensing amplitude, thus the overall signal is 2.3σ weaker than expected from MICE.
The
Euclid
space telescope will survey a large dataset of cosmic voids traced by dense samples of galaxies. In this work we estimate its expected performance when exploiting angular photometric void ...clustering, galaxy weak lensing, and their cross-correlation. To this aim, we implemented a Fisher matrix approach tailored for voids from the
Euclid
photometric dataset and we present the first forecasts on cosmological parameters that include the void-lensing correlation. We examined two different probe settings, pessimistic and optimistic, both for void clustering and galaxy lensing. We carried out forecast analyses in four model cosmologies, accounting for a varying total neutrino mass,
M
ν
, and a dynamical dark energy (DE) equation of state,
w
(
z
), described by the popular Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parametrization. We find that void clustering constraints on
h
and Ω
b
are competitive with galaxy lensing alone, while errors on
n
s
decrease thanks to the orthogonality of the two probes in the 2D-projected parameter space. We also note that, as a whole, with respect to assuming the two probes as independent, the inclusion of the void-lensing cross-correlation signal improves parameter constraints by 10 − 15%, and enhances the joint void clustering and galaxy lensing figure of merit (FoM) by 10% and 25%, in the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios, respectively. Finally, when further combining with the spectroscopic galaxy clustering, assumed as an independent probe, we find that, in the most competitive case, the FoM increases by a factor of 4 with respect to the combination of weak lensing and spectroscopic galaxy clustering taken as independent probes. The forecasts presented in this work show that photometric void clustering and its cross-correlation with galaxy lensing deserve to be exploited in the data analysis of the
Euclid
galaxy survey and promise to improve its constraining power, especially on
h
, Ω
b
, the neutrino mass, and the DE evolution.
We have investigated the cosmological constraints that can be expected from measurement of the cross-correlation of galaxies with cosmic voids identified in the
Euclid
spectroscopic survey, which ...will include spectroscopic information for tens of millions of galaxies over 15 000 deg
2
of the sky in the redshift range 0.9 ≤
z
< 1.8. We have done this using simulated measurements obtained from the Flagship mock catalogue, the official
Euclid
mock that closely matches the expected properties of the spectroscopic dataset. To mitigate anisotropic selection-bias effects, we have used a velocity field reconstruction method to remove large-scale redshift-space distortions from the galaxy field before void-finding. This allowed us to accurately model contributions to the observed anisotropy of the cross-correlation function arising from galaxy velocities around voids as well as from the Alcock–Paczynski effect, and we studied the dependence of constraints on the efficiency of reconstruction. We find that
Euclid
voids will be able to constrain the ratio of the transverse comoving distance
D
M
and Hubble distance
D
H
to a relative precision of about 0.3%, and the growth rate
fσ
8
to a precision of between 5% and 8% in each of the four redshift bins covering the full redshift range. In the standard cosmological model, this translates to a statistical uncertainty ΔΩ
m
= ±0.0028 on the matter density parameter from voids, which is better than what can be achieved from either
Euclid
galaxy clustering and weak lensing individually. We also find that voids alone can measure the dark energy equation of state to a 6% precision.