The Euclid Public Website

With the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission now scheduled for launch in the 3rd Quarter of 2023 a lot of work has been put in recently in developing the Euclid mission’s public website. For those of you not in the know, there is a summary on the new website:

ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

The public website is can be found here. Check it out. Many more stories, pictures and videos will be added over the forthcoming weeks but in the mean time here is a taster animated movie that shows various elements of the Euclid spacecraft, including the telescope, payload module and solar panels.

Even more information about the science to be done with Euclid can be found on the Euclid Consortium website, which is being revamped ahead of the launch.

“New” Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time once again for me to announce the publication of another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The new paper, published last week, is the 14th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 62nd in all. The latest publication is entitled “Gravitational Stability of Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter”. This paper is another one for the folder marked Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics and the authors are Mark N Brook Now at the Institute for Cancer Research in London) and Peter Coles (Who he? Ed).

There is a bit of a story behind this one. The work on which this paper is based was done while both authors (Mark and I) were at the University of Nottingham. Mark was my PhD student at the time.  I left Nottingham for Cardiff in 2007 but Mark stayed behind to finish his thesis and write this paper, which appeared on the arXiv in 2009. The paper wasn’t accepted in its original form, Mark left the field after obtaining his PhD, and I was working on other things at Cardiff so the paper remained unpublished on the arXiv.

Last year, however, I was updating my publication list and noticed the old preprint so looked it up on NASA/ADS. Although not Earth-shattering, I found it had been acquiring a reasonable number of citations (16 according to ADS, including some this year) as an unpublished work largely because of increased interest in the field of condensate dark matter. I therefore approached the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to ask their opinion about whether it would be appropriate to consider it for publication. They agreed and the paper was assigned to an Editor. Obviously I recused myself from the process.

Somewhat to my surprise, given that it’s basically an old paper, the referee comments were supportive. I’ve been very busy for the past year and communication with Mark was slow so it’s taken a while to revise and update the paper in line with the referee requests. We also took the opportunity to include a brief review of some papers that had come out since the original version of the paper appeared. Mark and I agreed a final text l and the paper was accepted last week. I uploaded the agreed version to arXiv and now the paper is now published. It was all a bit unconventional but there we are. It was interesting to be on the author side of the process for a change!

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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Making (Dark Matter) Waves: Untangling Wave Interference in Multi-Streaming CDM

A couple of days ago I announced the publication of a new paper in the Open Journal of Astrophysics called Making (dark matter) waves: Untangling wave interference for multi-streaming dark matter by Alex Gough and Cora Uhlemann. I forgot on that occasion to mention that there is a video of a talk by the first author in the series Cosmology at Home, so I’m remedying that now by posting the video here. Enjoy!

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time once again for me to announce another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The new paper, published last week, is the 13th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 61st in all. The latest publication is entitled “Making (dark matter) waves: Untangling wave interference for multi-streaming dark matter” and the authors are Alex Gough and Cora Uhlemann (both of Newcastle University). The paper is another one for the folder marked Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

This is a paper that’s close to one of my current research interests. I think it’s really excellent and I am very happy the authors chose to publish it in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

As a bonus here is a groovy animated version of Figure 1 from the paper showing the development of a multi-stream region.

And if that weren’t enough here is a short talk about their work in the Cosmology From Home series by the first author Alex Gough.

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Cosmological Constraints on Alternative Gravity Theories

The standard model of cosmology is based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In order to account for cosmological observations this has required the introduction of dark matter – which also helps explain the properties of individual galaxies – and dark energy. The result model, which I would describe as a working hypothesis, is rather successful but it is reasonable to question whether either or both of the dark components can be avoided by adopting an alternative theory of gravity instead of Einstein’s.

There is an interesting paper by Kris Pardo and David Spergel on arXiv that argues that none of the modifications of Einstein’s theory currently on the market is able to eliminate the need for dark matter. Here is the abstract of this paper:

It’s a more sophisticated version of an argument that has been going around at least in qualitative form for some time. The gist of it is that the distinctive pattern of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, observed by e.g. the Planck experiment, arise from coupling between baryons and photons in the early Universe. Similar features can be observed in the distribution of galaxies – where they are called Baryon Acoustic Oscilations (BAO) at a more recent cosmic epoch, but they are are much weaker. This is easily explicable if there is a dark matter component that dominates gravitational instability at late times but does not couple to photons via electromagnetic interactions. This is summed up in the following graphic (which I think I stole from a talk by John Peacock) based on data from about 20 years ago:

If there were no dark matter the coherent features seen in the power spectrum of the galaxy distribution would be much stronger; with dark matter dominating they are masked by the general growth of the collisionless component so their relative amplitude decreases.

The graphic shows how increasing the dark matter component from 0.1 to 0.3, while keeping the baryon component fixed, suppresses the wiggles corresponding to BAOs. The data suggest a dark matter contribution at the upper end of that range, consistent with the standard cosmology.

Of course if there are were no baryons at all there wouldn’t be fluctuations in either the CMB polarization or the galaxy distribution so both spectra would be smooth as shown in the graphic, but in that case there wouldn’t be anyone around to write about them as people are made of baryons.

This general conclusion is confirmed by the Pardo & Spergel paper, though it must be said that the argument doesn’t mean that modified gravity is impossible. It’s just that it seems nobody has yet thought of a specific model that satisfies all the constraints. That may change.

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Fuzzy Cosmology at ITP2022

Coles_ITP.pptx from Peter Coles

As I usually do when I give a talk (which hasn’t been for a while) I’ve uploaded the slides for the presentation I gave at the Irish Theoretical Physics meeting at DIAS this morning. The title of the talk was Fuzzy Cosmology and the abstract reads:

I discuss some applications of the Schrodinger-Poisson wave-mechanical approach to
cosmological structure formation. The most obvious use of this formalism is to “fuzzy” dark matter,
i.e. dark matter consisting of extremely light particles whose effective de Broglie wavelength is
sufficiently large to be astrophysically relevant, but it can be used to model more general scenarios
and has a number of advantages over standard methods based on Eulerian perturbation theory. I
illustrate the formalism with some calculations for cosmic voids and discuss its application to the
cosmological reconstruction problem(s).

I think it went reasonably well despite there being a hitch at the start because the touchpad on my laptop stopped working. Fortunately I was able to produce an emergency mouse. Anyway, here is a picture of me taken during the talk to prove I was there..

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time yet again to announce a new publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics! This one is the 3rd paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 51st in all. We actually published this on Friday, byt I’ve only just got around to announcing it here now.

The latest publication is entitled Differentiable Predictions for Large Scale Structure with SHAMNet and is written by Andrew Hearin, Nesar Ramachandra and Matthew R. Becker of the Argonne National Laboratory and Joseph DeRose of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (both institutions being in the USA).

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This paper is in our popular Cosmology and Non-galactic Astrophysics section.

P. S. Here’s a bit of feedback from the author of this paper about the referees:

They reviewed the paper in conscientious detail, and every comment was thoughtful. We feel that our paper has materially improved in clarity as a result of their critique.”

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Sins of Omission

There’s a paper recently published in Nature Astronomy by Moreno et al, which you can find on the arXiv here. The title is Galaxies lacking dark matter produced by close encounters in a cosmological simulation and the abstract is here:

The standard cold dark matter plus cosmological constant model predicts that galaxies form within dark-matter haloes, and that low-mass galaxies are more dark-matter dominated than massive ones. The unexpected discovery of two low-mass galaxies lacking dark matter immediately provoked concerns about the standard cosmology and ignited explorations of alternatives, including self-interacting dark matter and modified gravity. Apprehension grew after several cosmological simulations using the conventional model failed to form adequate numerical analogues with comparable internal characteristics (stellar masses, sizes, velocity dispersions and morphologies). Here we show that the standard paradigm naturally produces galaxies lacking dark matter with internal characteristics in agreement with observations. Using a state-of-the-art cosmological simulation and a meticulous galaxy-identification technique, we find that extreme close encounters with massive neighbours can be responsible for this. We predict that approximately 30 percent of massive central galaxies (with at least 10¹¹ solar masses in stars) harbour at least one dark-matter-deficient satellite (with 10⁸ – 10⁹ solar masses in stars). This distinctive class of galaxies provides an additional layer in our understanding of the role of interactions in shaping galactic properties. Future observations surveying galaxies in the aforementioned regime will provide a crucial test of this scenario.

It’s quite an interesting result.

I’m reminded of this very well known paper from way back in 1998, available on arXiv here, by Priya Natarajan, Steinn Sigurdsson and Joe Silk, with the abstract:

We propose a scenario for the formation of a population of baryon-rich, dark matter-deficient dwarf galaxies at high redshift that form from the mass swept out in the Intergalactic Medium (IGM) by energetic outflows from luminous quasars. We predict the intrinsic properties of these galaxies, and examine the prospects for their observational detection in the optical, X-ray and radio wavebands. Detectable thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich decrements (cold spots) on arc-minute scales in the cosmic microwave background radiation maps are expected during the shock-heated expanding phase from these hot bubbles. We conclude that the optimal detection strategy for these dwarfs is via narrow-band Lyman-α imaging of regions around high redshift quasars. An energetically scaled-down version of the same model is speculated upon as a possible mechanism for forming pre-galactic globular clusters.

It’s true that the detailed mechanism for forming dwarf galaxies with low dark matter densities is different in the two papers, but it does show that the issue being addressed by Moreno et al. had been addressed before. It seems to me therefore that the Natarajan et al. paper is clearly relevant background to the Moreno et al. one. I always tell junior colleagues to cite all relevant literature. I wonder why Moreno et al. decided not to do that with this paper?

Had Moreno et al. preprinted their paper before acceptance by Nature Astronomy I’m sure someone would have told them of this omission. This is yet another reason for submitting your papers to arXiv at the same time as you submit them to a journal rather than waiting for them to be published.

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Cosmology Talks: Alvaro Pozo on Potential Evidence for Wave Dark Matter

It’s time I shared another one of those interesting cosmology talks on the Youtube channel curated by Shaun Hotchkiss. This channel features technical talks rather than popular expositions so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but for those seriously interested in cosmology at a research level they should prove interesting. This is quite a recent one, from about a week ago.

In the talk, Alvaro Pozo tells us about a recent paper where he an collaborators detect the transition between a core (flat density profile) and halo (power law density profile) in dwarf galaxies. The full core + halo profile matches very closely what is expected in simulations of wave dark matter (sometimes called “fuzzy” dark matter), by which is meant dark matter consisting of a particle so light that its de Broglie wavelength is long enough to be astrophysically relevant. That is, there is a very flat core, which then drops off suddenly and then flattens off to a decaying power-law profile. The core matches the soliton expected in wave dark matter and the halo matches an outer NFW profile expected outside the soliton. They also detect evidence for tidal stripping of the matter in the galaxies. The galaxies closer to the centre of the Milky Way have their transition point between core and halo happen at smaller densities (despite the core density itself not being systematically smaller). The transition also appears to happen closer to the centre of the galaxy, which matches simulations. Of course the core+halo pattern they have clearly observed might be due to something else, but the match between wave dark matter simulations and observations is impressive. An important  caveat is that the mass for the dark matter that they use is very small and in significant tension with Lyman Alpha constraints for wave-like dark matter. This might indicate that the source of this universal core+halo pattern they’re observing comes from something else, or it might indicate that the wave dark matter is more complicated than represented in the simplest models.

P. S. The papers that accompany this talk can be found here.

P.P.S. If you’re interested in wave dark matter there is a nice recent review article by Lam Hui here.

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Cosmology Examination Results

The examination season in Maynooth being now over, and the results having been issued, I thought I’d pass on the results not for individual students but for the Universe as a whole.

As you can see Dark Energy is top of the class, with a good II.1 (Upper Second Class). A few years ago this candidate looked likely to get a mark over 70% and thus get First Class Honours, but in the end fell just short. Given the steady performance and possible improvement in future I think this candidate will probably be one to reckon with in a future research career.

In second place, a long way behind on about 27%, is Dark Matter. This candidate only answered some of the questions asked, and those not very convincingly. Although reasonably strong on theory, the candidate didn’t show up at all in the laboratory. The result is a fail but there is an opportunity for a repeat at a future date, though there is some doubt as to whether the candidate would appear.

At the bottom of the class on a meagre 5% we find Ordinary Matter. It seems this candidate must have left the examination early and did not even give the correct name (baryons) on the script. Technically this one could repeat but even doing so is unlikely even to get an Ordinary Degree. I would suggest that baryons aren’t really cut out for cosmology and should make alternative plans for the future.

 

P.S. Photons and neutrinos ceased interacting with the course some time ago. Owing to this lack of engagement they are assumed to have dropped out, and their marks are not shown.

 

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