Cosmology

Abstract:

It is a firm prediction of the concordance cold-dark-matter cosmological model that galaxy clusters occur at the intersection of large-scale structure filaments. The thread-like structure of this 'cosmic web' has been traced by galaxy redshift surveys for decades. More recently, the warm-hot intergalactic medium (a sparse plasma with temperatures of 10 5 kelvin to 10 7 kelvin) residing in low-redshift filaments has been observed in emission and absorption. However, a reliable direct detection of the underlying dark-matter skeleton, which should contain more than half of all matter, has remained elusive, because earlier candidates for such detections were either falsified or suffered from low signal-to-noise ratios and unphysical misalignments of dark and luminous matter. Here we report the detection of a dark-matter filament connecting the two main components of the Abell 222/223 supercluster system from its weak gravitational lensing signal, both in a non-parametric mass reconstruction and in parametric model fits. This filament is coincident with an overdensity of galaxies and diffuse, soft-X-ray emission, and contributes a mass comparable to that of an additional galaxy cluster to the total mass of the supercluster. By combining this result with X-ray observations, we can place an upper limit of 0.09 on the hot gas fraction (the mass of X-ray-emitting gas divided by the total mass) in the filament. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Abstract:

We present high-resolution maps of stars, dust, and molecular gas in a strongly lensed submillimeter galaxy (SMG) at z = 3.259. HATLAS J114637.9-001132 is selected from the Herschel-Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) as a strong lens candidate mainly based on its unusually high 500 μm flux density (300mJy). It is the only high-redshift Planck detection in the 130deg2 H-ATLAS Phase-I area. Keck Adaptive Optics images reveal a quadruply imaged galaxy in the K band while the Submillimeter Array and the Jansky Very Large Array show doubly imaged 880 μm and CO(1→0) sources, indicating differentiated distributions of the various components in the galaxy. In the source plane, the stars reside in three major kpc-scale clumps extended over 1.6kpc, the dust in a compact (∼1 kpc) region ∼3kpc north of the stars, and the cold molecular gas in an extended (∼7kpc) disk ∼5kpc northeast of the stars. The emissions from the stars, dust, and gas are magnified by ∼17, ∼8, and ∼7times, respectively, by four lensing galaxies at z ∼1. Intrinsically, the lensed galaxy is a warm (T dust ∼40-65 K), hyper-luminous (L IR ∼ 1.7 × 1013 L star formation rate (SFR) ∼2000 M yr-1), gas-rich (M gas/M baryon 70%), young (M stellar/SFR 20Myr), and short-lived (M gas/SFR 40Myr) starburst. With physical properties similar to unlensed z > 2 SMGs, HATLAS J114637.9-001132 offers a detailed view of a typical SMG through a powerful cosmic microscope. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..

Abstract:

We present an analysis of supernova light curves simulated for the upcoming Dark Energy Survey (DES) supernova search. The simulations employ a code suite that generates and fits realistic light curves in order to obtain distance modulus/redshift pairs that are passed to a cosmology fitter. We investigated several different survey strategies including field selection, supernova selection biases, and photometric redshift measurements. Using the results of this study, we chose a 30deg2 search area in the griz filter set. We forecast (1) that this survey will provide a homogeneous sample of up to 4000 TypeIa supernovae in the redshift range 0.05

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