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Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r)=0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources.

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The Simons Observatory : Science goals and forecasts

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which was dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009 and 23 October 2013, producing deep, high-resolution, all-sky maps in nine frequency bands from 30 to 857GHz. This paper presents the cosmological legacy of Planck, which currently provides our strongest constraints on the parameters of the standard cosmological model and some of the tightest limits available on deviations from that model. The 6-parameter LCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift, describing the cosmological information in over a billion map pixels with just six parameters. With 18 peaks in the temperature and polarization angular power spectra constrained well, Planck measures five of the six parameters to better than 1% (simultaneously), with the best-determined parameter (theta_*) now known to 0.03%. We describe the multi-component sky as seen by Planck, the success of the LCDM model, and the connection to lower-redshift probes of structure formation. We also give a comprehensive summary of the major changes introduced in this 2018 release. The Planck data, alone and in combination with other probes, provide stringent constraints on our models of the early Universe and the large-scale structure within which all astrophysical objects form and evolve. We discuss some lessons learned from the Planck mission, and highlight areas ripe for further experimental advances.

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Planck 2018 results. I. Overview and the cosmological legacy of Planck

The European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which was dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009 and 23 October 2013, producing deep, high-resolution, all-sky maps in nine frequency bands from 30 to 857 GHz. This paper presents the cosmological legacy of Planck, which currently provides our strongest constraints on the parameters of the standard cosmological model and some of the tightest limits available on deviations from that model. The 6-parameter ΛCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift, describing the cosmological information in over a billion map pixels with just six parameters. With 18 peaks in the temperature and polarization angular power spectra constrained well, Planck measures five of the six parameters to better than 1% (simultaneously), with the best-determined parameter (θ*) now known to 0.03%. We describe the multi-component sky as seen by Planck, the success of the ΛCDM model, and the connection to lower-redshift probes of structure formation. We also give a comprehensive summary of the major changes introduced in this 2018 release. The Planck data, alone and in combination with other probes, provide stringent constraints on our models of the early Universe and the large-scale structure within which all astrophysical objects form and evolve. We discuss some lessons learned from the Planck mission, and highlight areas ripe for further experimental advances.

/pdf/planck-2018-results-i-overview-and-the-cosmological-legacy-2y4qioeddy.pdf

We develop and test a method for measuring the gravitational lensing induced distortion of faint background galaxies. We first describe how we locate the galaxies and measure a 2-component `polarisation' or ellipticity statistic $e_\alpha$ whose expectation value should be proportional to the gravitational shear $\gamma_\alpha$. We then show that an anisotropic instrumental psf perturbs the polarisation by $\delta e_\alpha = P^s_{\alpha\beta} p_\beta$, where $p_\alpha$ is a measure of the psf anisotropy and $P^s_{\alpha\beta}$ is the `linearised smear polarisability tensor'. By estimating $P^s_{\alpha\beta}$ for each object we can determine $p_\alpha$ from the foreground stars and apply a correction $-P^s_{\alpha\beta}p_\beta$ to the galaxies. We test this procedure using deep high-resolution images from HST which are smeared with an anisotropic psf and then have noise added to simulate ground-based observations. We find that the procedure works very well. A similar analysis yields a linear shear polarisability tensor $P^\gamma_{\alpha\beta}$ which describes the response to a gravitational shear. This calibrates the polarisation-shear relation, but only for galaxies which are well resolved. To empirically calibrate the effect of seeing on the smaller galaxies we artificially stretch HST images to simulate lensing and then degrade them as before. These experiments provide a rigorous and exacting test of the method under realistic conditions. They show that it is possible to remove the effect of instrumental psf anisotropy, and that the method provides an efficient and quantitative measurement of the gravitational shear.

A Method for Weak Lensing Observations

.The La Silla-QUEST Low Redshift Supernova Survey is a part of the La Silla-QUEST Southern Hemisphere Variability Survey. The survey uses the 10 deg210 deg2 QUEST camera installed at the prime focus of the 1.0-m Schmidt Telescope of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile, and utilizes essentially all of the observing time of the telescope. The QUEST camera was installed on the ESO Schmidt telescope in 2009 after completing a 5 year variability survey in the northern hemisphere using the 1.2-m Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar. La Silla-QUEST started science operations in 2009 September. The low redshift supernova survey commenced in 2011 December and is planned to continue for the next 4 years. In this article we describe the instrumentation, software, operation, and performance characteristics of the survey.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/671198/pdf

The La Silla-QUEST Low Redshift Supernova Survey

A search for RR Lyrae stars (RRLSs) in ~840 deg2 of the sky in right ascension 150°-210° and declination –10° to + 10° yielded 1013 type ab and 359 type c RRLS. This sample is used to study the density profile of the Galactic halo, halo substructures, and the Oosterhoff type of the halo over distances (d ☉) from ~5 to ~80 kpc. The halo is flattened toward the Galactic plane, and its density profile steepens in slope at galactocentric distances greater than ~25 kpc. The RRLS in the stellar stream from the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy match well the model of Law & Majewski for the stars that were stripped 1.3-3.2 Gyr ago, but not for the ones stripped 3.2-5.0 Gyr ago. Over densities are found at the locations of the Virgo Overdensity and the Virgo Stellar Stream. Within 1° of 1220-1, which Jerjen et al. identify as a halo substructure at d ☉ ~ 24 kpc, there are four RRLS that are possibly members. Away from substructures, the RRLS are a mixture of Oosterhoff types I and II, but mostly OoI (~73%). The accretion of galaxies resembling in RRLS content the most massive Milky Way satellites (LMC, SMC, For, Sgr) may explain this preponderance of OoI. Six new RRLS and three new anomalous Cepheids were found in the Sextans dSph galaxy.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/781/1/22/pdf

La silla quest rr lyrae star survey: region i

Thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) power spectrum is one of the most sensitive methods to constrain cosmological parameters, scaling as the amplitude $\sigma_8^8$. It is determined by the integral over the halo mass function multiplied by the total pressure content of clusters, and further convolved by the cluster gas pressure profile. It has been shown that various feedback effects can change significantly the pressure profile, possibly even pushing the gas out to the virial radius and beyond, strongly affecting the tSZ power spectrum at high $l$. Energetics arguments and SZ-halo mass scaling relations suggest feedback is unlikely to significantly change the total pressure content, making low $l$ tSZ power spectrum more robust against feedback effects. Furthermore, the separation between the cosmic infrared background (CIB) and tSZ is more reliable at low $l$. Low $l$ modes are however probing very small volumes, giving rise to very large non-gaussian sampling variance errors. By computing the trispectrum contribution we identify $90<l<350$ as the minimum variance scale where the combined error is minimized. Using the measurement at this $l$ provides constraints that are almost as strong as using the entire power spectrum. We extend the work by the Planck collaboration by including a full trispectrum and feedback effects in the analysis. We perform a Markov-Chain Monte Carlo analysis over the two dimensional parameter space and find constraints on $\sigma_8$ by marginalizing over the feedback nuisance parameter.We obtain $\sigma_8 =0.820^{+0.021}_{-0.009}\left(\Omega_m/0.31\right)^{0.4}$, when fixing other parameters to Planck cosmology values. Our results suggest it is possible to obtain competitive cosmological constraints from tSZ without cluster redshift information, and that the current tSZ power spectrum shows no evidence for a low amplitude of $\sigma_8$.

Cosmological constraints from thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich power spectrum revisited

Much attention has been drawn to the recent discoveries by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) of merging intermediate mass black holes. Of particular interest is the possibility that the merger events detected could be evidence of dark matter in the form of primordial black holes (PBHs). It has been argued that the presence of many black holes would effect the thermal and ionization history of the universe via their accretion of matter which would have strong signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background's (CMB) power spectra evident in the damping of anisotropies and change in low-$l$ polarization power. In general the accretion is quite sensitive to the specific physics involved and the conditions of the early universe. In this work, we take a minimal approach and find constraints on PBHs not including the model dependent effects of nonlinear structure of formation or transition between different accretion models which would work to increase the effect. In addition, we include the relative velocity between dark matter and baryonic matter including the effects of supersonic streaming at high redshift which work to significantly reduce the constraining power. We also examine the constraints on more astrophysically-motivated extended black hole mass functions and discuss how mergers might effect this distribution. We find constraints on PBHs in the range $ \approx 30 M_\odot$, finding that they could not compose more than $10\%$ of the total dark matter content.

Revisiting Primordial Black Holes Constraints from Ionization History

Author(s): Horowitz, B; Lee, KG; White, M; Krolewski, A; Ata, M | Abstract: Recent Lyα forest tomography measurements of the intergalactic medium (IGM) have revealed a wealth of cosmic structures at high redshift (z ∼ 2.5). In this work, we present the Tomographic Absorption Reconstruction and Density Inference Scheme (TARDIS), a new chronocosmographic analysis tool for understanding the formation and evolution of these observed structures. We use maximum likelihood techniques with a fast nonlinear gravitational model to reconstruct the initial density field of the observed regions. We find that TARDIS allows accurate reconstruction of smaller-scale structures than standard Wiener-filtering techniques. Applying this technique to mock Lyα forest data sets that simulate ongoing and future surveys such as CLAMATO, Subaru PFS, or the ELTs, we are able to infer the underlying matter density field at observed redshift and classify the cosmic web structures. We find good agreement with the underlying truth in both the characteristic eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the pseudo-deformation tensor, with the eigenvalues inferred from 30 m class telescopes correlated at r = 0.95 relative to the truth. As an output of this method, we are able to further evolve the inferred structures to late time (z = 0) and also track the trajectories of coeval z = 2.5 galaxies to their z = 0 cosmic web environments.

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Benjamin Horowitz

Papers

The La Silla-QUEST Low Redshift Supernova Survey

La silla quest rr lyrae star survey: region i

Cosmological constraints from thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich power spectrum revisited

Revisiting Primordial Black Holes Constraints from Ionization History

TARDIS. I. A Constrained Reconstruction Approach to Modeling the z ∼ 2.5 Cosmic Web Probed by Lyα Forest Tomography