Un equipo internacional de astrofísicos y cosmólogos ha presentado cinco artículos que indican que la «agrupación» (valor S8) de la materia oscura del universo es 0,76, un número consistente con otros estudios de lentes gravitacionales pero no con el valor de 0,83 derivado del fondo cósmico de microondas. .

Un equipo internacional de científicos utilizó Advanced Technologies e Hyper Suprime-Cam para estudiar los ‘grupos’ de materia oscura y encontró un valor S8 de 0,76, que contrasta con el valor de 0,83 del fondo cósmico de microondas. Esta discrepancia podría indicar errores de medición o un modelo cosmológico estándar incompleto.

Un equipo internacional de astrofísicos y cosmólogos de varios institutos, incluido el Instituto Kavli de Física y Matemáticas del Universo (Kavli IPMU), ha presentado un conjunto de cinco trabajos de investigación que miden el valor de los «grupos» de materia oscura en el universo, conocidos a cosmólogos como S.₈, de 0,76, que se alinea con los valores encontrados por otras encuestas de lentes gravitacionales que analizan el universo relativamente joven, pero no se alinea con un valor de 0,83 derivado del fondo cósmico de microondas, que se remonta a los orígenes del universo cuando el universo tenía unos 380.000 años. Sus resultados se han subido como hojas preimpresas a arXiv.

La brecha entre estos dos valores es pequeña, pero a medida que más y más estudios confirman ambos valores, no parece ser accidental. Lo más probable es que haya un error desconocido hasta ahora en una de estas dos mediciones o que el modelo cosmológico estándar esté incompleto de una manera interesante.

La energía oscura y la materia oscura constituyen el 95 % del universo que vemos hoy, pero entendemos muy poco sobre lo que realmente son y cómo han evolucionado a lo largo de la historia del universo. Los cúmulos de materia oscura distorsionan la luz de las galaxias distantes a través de lentes gravitacionales débiles, un fenómeno predicho por la teoría general de la relatividad de Einstein.

Figura 1: Ejemplo de una imagen obtenida con HSC-SSP. Crédito: Proyecto HSC-SSP y NAOJ

«Esta distorsión es un efecto realmente pequeño. La forma de una sola galaxia se distorsiona en una cantidad imperceptible», dijo el profesor Masahiro Takada de Kavli IPMU, pero la combinación de mediciones de millones de galaxias permite medir la distorsión con alta precisión.

El modelo estándar se define por unos pocos números: la tasa de expansión del universo, que es una medida de la densidad de la materia oscura (S₈), las contribuciones relativas de los constituyentes del universo (materia, materia oscura y energía oscura), la densidad general del universo y una cantidad técnica que describe cómo se relaciona la aglomeración del universo a gran escala con la de pequeña escala.

Los cosmólogos están ansiosos por probar este modelo restringiendo estos números de varias maneras, como observar las fluctuaciones en el fondo cósmico de microondas, modelar la historia de expansión del universo o medir el agrupamiento del universo en un pasado relativamente reciente.

Un equipo dirigido por astrónomos de Kavli IPMU, Universidad de Tokio,[{» attribute=»»>Nagoya University, Princeton University, and astronomical communities of Japan and Taiwan, have spent the past year teasing out the secrets of this most elusive material, dark matter, using sophisticated computer simulations and data from the first three years of the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey. The observations from this survey used one of the most powerful astronomical cameras in the world, the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) mounted on the Subaru Telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii.

Figure 2: The measurement results of S8 parameter from HSC-SSP Year 3 data. The chart shows the results from four different methods, which used different parts of the HSC-SSP Year 3 data or combined the HSC-SSP Year 3 data with other data. For comparison, “Planck CMB” shows the measurement result for S8 from the cosmic microwave background data from the Planck satellite. “Other weak lensing results” shows the results from similar weak lensing measurements based on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) data. Credit: Kavli IPMU

Hiding and uncovering the data

The team performed a “blinded analysis.”

“Scientists are human beings, and they do have preferences. Some would love to really find something fundamentally new, while others might feel comfortable if they find results that look consistent with foreseen results. Scientists have become self-aware enough to know that they will bias themselves, no matter how careful they are, unless they carry out their analysis without allowing themselves to know the results until the end,” said Nagoya University Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe (KMI) Associate Professor Hironao Miyatake.

To protect the results from such biases, the HSC team hid their results from themselves and their colleagues for months. The team even added an extra obfuscating layer: they ran their analyses on three different galactic catalogs, one real and two fake with numerical values offset by random values. The analysis team didn’t know which of them was real, so even if someone did accidentally see the values, the team wouldn’t know if the results were based on the real catalog or not.

The team spent a year on the blind analysis. On December 3 2022, the team gathered together on Zoom – one Saturday morning in Japan, Friday evening in Princeton – for the “unblinding.” The team unveiled the data, and ran their plots, immediately they saw it was great according to Takada. “Blinded analysis means you cannot take a peak at the results while running the analysis, which was extremely stressful, but as soon I saw the final result, all of that anxiety flew out of the window,” said Kavli IPMU graduate student Sunao Sugiyama.

Figure 3: An example of a 3D distribution of dark matter derived from HSC-SSP. This map is obtained by using the first year’s data, but the present study examined an area on the sky about three times larger than that. Credit: University of Tokyo/NAOJ

A huge survey with the world’s largest telescope camera

HSC is the largest camera on a telescope of its size in the world. The survey that the research team used covers about 420 square degrees of the sky, about the equivalent of 2000 full moons. It is not a single contiguous chunk of sky, but split among six different pieces, each about the size of a person’s outstretched fist. The 25 million galaxies the researchers surveyed are so distant that instead of seeing these galaxies as they are today, the HSC recorded how they were billions of years ago.

Each of these galaxies glows with the fires of tens of billions of suns, but because they are so far away, they are extremely faint, as much as 25 million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye.

For more on this research, see Measuring Dark Matter With Hyper Suprime-Cam Reveals Discrepancy.

References:

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arXiv:2304.00704

“Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Results: Measurements of Clustering of SDSS-BOSS Galaxies, Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing and Cosmic Shear” by Surhud More, Sunao Sugiyama, Hironao Miyatake, Markus Michael Rau, Masato Shirasaki, Xiangchong Li, Atsushi J. Nishizawa, Ken Osato, Tianqing Zhang, Masahiro Takada, Takashi Hamana, Ryuichi Takahashi, Roohi Dalal, Rachel Mandelbaum, Michael A. Strauss, Yosuke Kobayashi, Takahiro Nishimichi, Masamune Oguri, Arun Kannawadi, Robert Armstrong, Yutaka Komiyama, Robert H. Lupton, Nate B. Lust, Satoshi Miyazaki, Hitoshi Murayama, Yuki Okura, Paul A. Price, Philip J. Tait, Masayuki Tanaka and Shiang-Yu Wang, 3 April 2023, Astrophysics > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
arXiv:2304.00703

“Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing with HSC and SDSS using the Minimal Bias Model” by Sunao Sugiyama, Hironao Miyatake, Surhud More, Xiangchong Li, Masato Shirasaki, Masahiro Takada, Yosuke Kobayashi, Ryuichi Takahashi, Takahiro Nishimichi, Atsushi J. Nishizawa, Markus M. Rau, Tianqing Zhang, Roohi Dalal, Rachel Mandelbaum, Michael A. Strauss, Takashi Hamana, Masamune Oguri, Ken Osato, Arun Kannawadi, Robert Armstrong, Yutaka Komiyama, Robert H. Lupton, Nate B. Lust, Satoshi Miyazaki, Hitoshi Murayama, Yuki Okura, Paul A. Price, Philip J. Tait, Masayuki Tanaka and Shiang-Yu Wang, 3 April 2023, Astrophysics > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
arXiv:2304.00705

“Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Cosmic Shear Power Spectra” by Roohi Dalal, Xiangchong Li, Andrina Nicola, Joe Zuntz, Michael A. Strauss, Sunao Sugiyama, Tianqing Zhang, Markus M. Rau, Rachel Mandelbaum, Masahiro Takada, Surhud More, Hironao Miyatake, Arun Kannawadi, Masato Shirasaki, Takanori Taniguchi, Ryuichi Takahashi, Ken Osato, Takashi Hamana, Masamune Oguri, Atsushi J. Nishizawa, Andrés A. Plazas Malagón, Tomomi Sunayama, David Alonso, Anže Slosar, Robert Armstrong, James Bosch, Yutaka Komiyama, Robert H. Lupton, Nate B. Lust, Lauren A. MacArthur, Satoshi Miyazaki, Hitoshi Murayama, Takahiro Nishimichi, Yuki Okura, Paul A. Price, Philip J. Tait, Masayuki Tanaka and Shiang-Yu Wang, 3 April 2023, Astrophysics > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
arXiv:2304.00701

“Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Cosmic Shear Two-point Correlation Functions” by Xiangchong Li, Tianqing Zhang, Sunao Sugiyama, Roohi Dalal, Markus M. Rau, Rachel Mandelbaum, Masahiro Takada, Surhud More, Michael A. Strauss, Hironao Miyatake, Masato Shirasaki, Takashi Hamana, Masamune Oguri, Wentao Luo, Atsushi J. Nishizawa, Ryuichi Takahashi, Andrina Nicola, Ken Osato, Arun Kannawadi, Tomomi Sunayama, Robert Armstrong, Yutaka Komiyama, Robert H. Lupton, Nate B. Lust, Satoshi Miyazaki, Hitoshi Murayama, Takahiro Nishimichi, Yuki Okura, Paul A. Price, Philip J. Tait, Masayuki Tanaka, Shiang-Yu Wang, 3 April 2023, Astrophysics > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
arXiv:2304.00702