Particle theory

Abstract:

We determine the dipole in the WISE galaxy catalogue. After reducing star contamination to <0.1% by rejecting sources with high apparent motion and those close to the Galactic plane, we eliminate low redshift sources to suppress the non-kinematic, clustering dipole. We remove sources within {\pm}5{\deg} of the super-galactic plane, as well as those within 1'' of 2MRS sources at redshift z < 0.03. We enforce cuts on the source angular extent to preferentially select distant ones. As we progress along these steps, the dipole converges in direction to within 5{\deg} of the CMB dipole and its magnitude also progressively reduces but stabilises at {\sim}0.012, corresponding to a velocity >1000 km/s if it is solely of kinematic origin. However, previous studies have shown that only {\sim}70% of the velocity of the Local Group as inferred from the CMB dipole is due to sources at z < 0.03. We examine the Dark Sky simulations to quantify the prevalence of such environments and find that <2.1% of Milky Way-like observers in a {\Lambda}CDM universe should observe the bulk flow (> 240 km/s extending to z > 0.03) that we do. We construct mock catalogues in the neighbourhood of such peculiar observers in order to mimic our final galaxy selection and quantify the residual clustering dipole. After subtracting this the remaining dipole is 0.0048 {\pm} 0.0022, corresponding to a velocity of 420 {\pm} 213 km/s which is consistent with the CMB. However the sources (at z > 0.03) of such a large clustering dipole remain to be identified.

Abstract:

Highly spinning Kerr black holes with masses $M = 1 - 100\ M_{\odot}$ are subject to an efficient superradiant instability in the presence of bosons with masses $\mu \sim 10^{-10} - 10^{-12}\ {\rm eV}$. We observe that this matches the effective plasma-induced photon mass in diffuse galactic or intracluster environments ($\omega_{\rm pl} \sim 10^{-10} - 10^{-12}\ {\rm eV}$). This suggests that bare Kerr black holes within galactic or intracluster environments, possibly even including the ones produced in recently observed gravitational wave events, are unstable to formation of a photon cloud that may contain a significant fraction of the mass of the original black hole. At maximal efficiency, the instability timescale for a massive vector is milliseconds, potentially leading to a transient rate of energy extraction from a black hole in principle as large as $\sim 10^{55} \ {\rm erg \, s}^{-1}$. We discuss possible astrophysical effects this could give rise to, including a speculative connection to Fast Radio Bursts.

Abstract:

We consider the possibility that the primordial curvature perturbation is direction-dependent. To first order this is parameterised by a quadrupolar modulation of the power spectrum and results in statistical anisotropy of the CMB, which can be quantified using 'bipolar spherical harmonics'. We compute these for the Planck DR2-2015 SMICA map and estimate the noise covariance from Planck Full Focal Plane 9 simulations. A constant quadrupolar modulation is detected with 2.2 σ significance, dropping to 2σ when the primordial power is assumed to scale with wave number k as a power law. Going beyond previous work we now allow the spectrum to have arbitrary scale-dependence. Our non-parametric reconstruction then suggests several spectral features, the most prominent at k ∼ 0.006 Mpc-1. When a constant quadrupolar modulation is fitted to data in the range 0.005 ≤ k/Mpc-1 ≤ 0.008, its preferred directions are found to be related to the cosmic hemispherical asymmetry and the CMB dipole. To determine the significance we apply two test statistics to our reconstructions of the quadrupolar modulation from data, against reconstructions of realisations of noise only. With a test statistic sensitive only to the amplitude of the modulation, the reconstructions from the multipole range 30 ≤ ℓ ≤ 1200 are unusual with 2.1σ significance. With the second test statistic, sensitive also to the direction, the significance rises to 6.9σ. Our approach is easily generalised to include other data sets such as polarisation, large-scale structure and forthcoming 21-cm line observations which will enable these anomalies to be investigated further.