Marius Cautun

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the characteristics and the time evolution of morphological components of the cosmic web and employed new analysis techniques to determine the spatial extent of filaments and sheets, like their total length and local width.

TL;DR: In this paper, a variety of different methods have been devised to classify the cosmic web, depending on the data at hand, be it numerical simulations, large sky surveys or other.

Abstract: We determine the Milky Way (MW) mass profile inferred from fitting physically motivated models to the Gaia DR2 Galactic rotation curve and other data. Using various hydrodynamical simulations of MW-mass haloes, we show that the presence of baryons induces a contraction of the dark matter (DM) distribution in the inner regions, r . 20 kpc. We provide an analytic expression that relates the baryonic distribution to the change in the DM halo profile. For our galaxy, the contraction increases the enclosed DM halo mass by factors of roughly 1.3, 2 and 4 at radial distances of 20, 8 and 1 kpc, respectively compared to an uncontracted halo. Ignoring this contraction results in systematic biases in the inferred halo mass and concentration. We provide a best-fitting contracted NFW halo model to the MW rotation curve that matches the data very well†. The best-fit has a DM halo mass, MDM 200 = 0.97+0.24 −0.19×1012 M, and concentration before baryon contraction of 9.4 +1.9 −2.6 , which lie close to the median halo mass–concentration relation predicted in ΛCDM. The inferred total mass, Mtotal 200 = 1.08+0.20 −0.14 × 1012 M, is in good agreement with recent measurements. The model gives a MW stellar mass of 5.04+0.43 −0.52 × 1010 M and infers that the DM density at the Solar position is ρ DM = 8.8 +0.5 −0.5 ×10−3 M pc−3 ≡ 0.33+0.02 −0.02 GeV cm−3 . The rotation curve data can also be fitted with an uncontracted NFW halo model, but with very different DM and stellar parameters. The observations prefer the physically motivated contracted NFW halo, but the measurement uncertainties are too large to rule out the uncontracted NFW halo.

TL;DR: The NEXUS algorithm is introduced, a multiscale and automatic morphological analysis tool that identifies all the cosmic structures in a scale free way, without preference for a certain size or shape and the method captures much better the filamentary and wall networks and is successful in detecting even the fainter structures.

TL;DR: In this article, a new Bayesian inference method was proposed to estimate the total number and luminosity function of the satellite population of the Milky Way (MW) by combining the sample of satellites recently discovered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) survey with the satellites found in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 9 (together these surveys cover nearly half the sky).