Cosmology

Abstract:

We have studied a sample of 296 faint (> 0.5 mJy) radio sources selected from an area of the Tenth Cambridge (10C) survey at 15.7 GHz in the Lockman Hole. By matching this catalogue to several lower frequency surveys (e.g. including a deep GMRT survey at 610 MHz, a WSRT survey at 1.4 GHz, NVSS, FIRST and WENSS) we have investigated the radio spectral properties of the sources in this sample; all but 30 of the 10C sources are matched to one or more of these surveys. We have found a significant increase in the proportion of flat spectrum sources at flux densities below approximately 1 mJy - the median spectral index between 15.7 GHz and 610 MHz changes from 0.75 for flux densities greater than 1.5 mJy to 0.08 for flux densities less than 0.8 mJy. This suggests that a population of faint, flat spectrum sources is emerging at flux densities below 1 mJy. The spectral index distribution of this sample of sources selected at 15.7 GHz is compared to those of two samples selected at 1.4 GHz from FIRST and NVSS. We find that there is a significant flat spectrum population present in the 10C sample which is missing from the samples selected at 1.4 GHz. The 10C sample is compared to a sample of sources selected from the SKADS Simulated Sky by Wilman et al. and we find that this simulation fails to reproduce the observed spectral index distribution and significantly underpredicts the number of sources in the faintest flux density bin. It is likely that the observed faint, flat spectrum sources are a result of the cores of FRI sources becoming dominant at high frequencies. These results highlight the importance of studying this faint, high frequency population.

Abstract:

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) comprises deep multi-colour (u*g'r'i'z') photometry spanning 154 square degrees, with accurate photometric redshifts and shape measurements. We demonstrate that the redshift probability distribution function summed over galaxies provides an accurate representation of the galaxy redshift distribution accounting for random and catastrophic errors for galaxies with best fitting photometric redshifts z_p < 1.3. We present cosmological constraints using tomographic weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure. We use two broad redshift bins 0.5 < z_p <= 0.85 and 0.85 < z_p <= 1.3 free of intrinsic alignment contamination, and measure the shear correlation function on angular scales in the range ~1-40 arcmin. We show that the problematic redshift scaling of the shear signal, found in previous CFHTLS data analyses, does not afflict the CFHTLenS data. For a flat Lambda-CDM model and a fixed matter density Omega_m=0.27, we find the normalisation of the matter power spectrum sigma_8=0.771 \pm 0.041. When combined with cosmic microwave background data (WMAP7), baryon acoustic oscillation data (BOSS), and a prior on the Hubble constant from the HST distance ladder, we find that CFHTLenS improves the precision of the fully marginalised parameter estimates by an average factor of 1.5-2. Combining our results with the above cosmological probes, we find Omega_m=0.2762 \pm 0.0074 and sigma_8=0.802 \pm 0.013.

Abstract:

We present cosmological constraints from 2D weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) which spans 154 square degrees in five optical bands. Using accurate photometric redshifts and measured shapes for 4.2 million galaxies between redshifts of 0.2 and 1.3, we compute the 2D cosmic shear correlation function over angular scales ranging between 0.8 and 350 arcmin. Using non-linear models of the dark-matter power spectrum, we constrain cosmological parameters by exploring the parameter space with Population Monte Carlo sampling. The best constraints from lensing alone are obtained for the small-scale density-fluctuations amplitude sigma_8 scaled with the total matter density Omega_m. For a flat LambdaCDM model we obtain sigma_8(Omega_m/0.27)^0.6 = 0.79+-0.03. We combine the CFHTLenS data with WMAP7, BOSS and an HST distance-ladder prior on the Hubble constant to get joint constraints. For a flat LambdaCDM model, we find Omega_m = 0.283+-0.010 and sigma_8 = 0.813+-0.014. In the case of a curved wCDM universe, we obtain Omega_m = 0.27+-0.03, sigma_8 = 0.83+-0.04, w_0 = -1.10+-0.15 and Omega_K = 0.006+0.006-0.004. We calculate the Bayesian evidence to compare flat and curved LambdaCDM and dark-energy CDM models. From the combination of all four probes, we find models with curvature to be at moderately disfavoured with respect to the flat case. A simple dark-energy model is indistinguishable from LambdaCDM. Our results therefore do not necessitate any deviations from the standard cosmological model.