Search results for "Astrophysics - cosmology and nongalactic astrophysics"
showing 10 items of 607 documents
Catching the radio flare in CTA 102
2011
Context: The blazar CTA 102 (z=1.037) underwent a historical radio outburst in April 2006. This event offered a unique chance to study the physical properties of the jet. Aims: We used multifrequency radio and mm observations to analyze the evolution of the spectral parameters during the flare as a test of the shock-in-jet model under these extreme conditions. Methods: For the analysis of the flare we took into account that the flaring spectrum is superimposed on a quiescent spectrum. We reconstructed the latter from archival data and fitted a synchrotron self-absorbed distribution of emission. The uncertainties of the derived spectral parameters were calculated using Monte Carlo simulation…
Ionization of atoms by slow heavy particles, including dark matter
2016
Atoms and molecules can become ionized during the scattering of a slow, heavy particle off a bound electron. Such an interaction involving leptophilic weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) is a promising possible explanation for the anomalous 9 sigma annual modulation in the DAMA dark matter direct detection experiment [R. Bernabei et al., Eur. Phys. J. C 73, 2648 (2013)]. We demonstrate the applicability of the Born approximation for such an interaction by showing its equivalence to the semiclassical adiabatic treatment of atomic ionization by slow-moving WIMPs. Conventional wisdom has it that the ionization probability for such a process should be exponentially small. We show, howe…
Dark matter scattering on electrons: Accurate calculations of atomic excitations and implications for the DAMA signal
2016
We revisit the WIMP-type dark matter scattering on electrons that results in atomic ionization and can manifest itself in a variety of existing direct-detection experiments. Unlike the WIMP-nucleon scattering, where current experiments probe typical interaction strengths much smaller than the Fermi constant, the scattering on electrons requires a much stronger interaction to be detectable, which in turn requires new light force carriers. We account for such new forces explicitly, by introducing a mediator particle with scalar or vector couplings to dark matter and to electrons. We then perform state-of-the-art numerical calculations of atomic ionization relevant to the existing experiments.…
REMARKS ON THE METHODS OF INVESTIGATIONS OF ALIGNMENT OF GALAXIES
2011
In the 1975 Hawley and Peebles gave the proposal to use three statistical tests for investigations of the galaxies orientation in the large structures. Nowadays, it has been considered as the standard method of searching for galactic alignments. In the present paper we analyzed the tests in details and proposed a few improvements. Basing on the improvements, the new method of analysis of the alignment of galaxies in clusters is proposed. The power of this method is demonstrated on the sample of 247 Abell clusters with at least 100 objects in each. The distributions of the position angles for galaxies in each cluster are analyzed using statistical tests: $\chi^2$, Fourier, autocorrelation an…
Some aspects of the orientation of galaxies in clusters
2013
The analysis of Tully's groups of galaxies belonging to the Local Supercluster (LSC) was performed. In the 1975 Hawley and Peebles presented the method for investigations of the galaxies orientation in the large structures. In our previous papers statistical test proposed by Hawley and Peebles for investigation of this problem was analyzed in details and some improvements were suggested. On this base the new method of the analysis of galactic alignment in clusters was proposed. Using this method, God{\l}owski (2012) analyzed the orientation of galaxies inside Tully's group founding no significant deviations from isotropy both in orientation of position angles and $\delta_D$ and $\eta$ angle…
Clustering of Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Photometric Luminous Galaxies: The Measurement, Systematics and Cosmological Implications
2012
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) surveyed 14,555 square degrees, and delivered over a trillion pixels of imaging data. We present a study of galaxy clustering using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts, spanning between $z=0.45$ and $z=0.65$, constructed from the SDSS using methods described in Ross et al. (2011). This data-set spans 11,000 square degrees and probes a volume of $3h^{-3} \rm{Gpc}^3$, making it the largest volume ever used for galaxy clustering measurements. We present a novel treatment of the observational systematics and its applications to the clustering signals from the data set. In this paper, we measure the angular clustering using an optimal quadrati…
Warm dark matter and the ionization history of the Universe
2017
In warm dark matter scenarios structure formation is suppressed on small scales with respect to the cold dark matter case, reducing the number of low-mass halos and the fraction of ionized gas at high redshifts and thus, delaying reionization. This has an impact on the ionization history of the Universe and measurements of the optical depth to reionization, of the evolution of the global fraction of ionized gas and of the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, can be used to set constraints on the mass of the dark matter particle. However, the suppression of the fraction of ionized medium in these scenarios can be partly compensated by varying other parameters, as the ionization effic…
Future sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to dark matter annihilations from the cosmic diffuse neutrino signal
2014
Cosmological observations and cold dark matter N-body simulations indicate that our Universe is populated by numerous halos, where dark matter particles annihilate, potentially producing Standard Model particles. In this paper we calculate the contribution to the diffuse neutrino background from dark matter annihilations in halos at all redshifts and we estimate the future sensitivity to the annihilation cross section of neutrino telescopes such as IceCube or ANTARES. We consider various parametrizations to describe the internal halo properties and for the halo mass function in order to bracket the theoretical uncertainty in the limits from the modeling of the cosmological annihilation flux…
More about a successful vector-tensor theory of gravitation
2016
The vector-tensor (VT) theory of gravitation revisited in this article was studied in previous papers, where it was proved that VT works and deserves attention. New observational data and numerical codes have motivated further development which is presented here. New research has been planed with the essential aim of proving that current cosmological observations, including Planck data, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), and so on, may be explained with VT, a theory which accounts for a kind of dark energy which has the same equation of state as vacuum. New versions of the codes CAMB and COSMOMC have been designed for applications to VT, and the resulting versions have been used to get the…
The best fit for the observed galaxy Counts-in-Cell distribution function
2017
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the first dense redshift survey encompassing a volume large enough to find the best analytic probability density function that fits the galaxy Counts-in-Cells distribution $f_V(N)$, the frequency distribution of galaxy counts in a volume $V$. Different analytic functions have been previously proposed that can account for some of the observed features of the observed frequency counts, but fail to provide an overall good fit to this important statistical descriptor of the galaxy large-scale distribution. Our goal is to find the probability density function that better fits the observed Counts-in-Cells distribution $f_V(N)$. We have made a systematic stud…