Tag Archives: Cosmology

We don’t Need no Stinkin’ Dark Matter

Extra Acceleration

You’ve heard of dark matter, right? Some sort of exotic particle that lurks in the outskirts of galaxies.

Maybe you know the story of elusive dark matter. The first apparent home for dark matter was in clusters of galaxies, as Fritz Zwicky postulated for the Coma Cluster in the 1930s, due to the excessive galaxy random motions that he measured.

There have been eight decades of discovery and measurement of the gravitational anomalies that dark matter is said to cause, and eight decades of notable failure to directly find any very faint ordinary matter, black holes, or exotic particle matter in sufficient quantities to explain the magnitude of the observed anomalies.

If dark matter is actually real and composed of particles or primordial black holes then there is five times as much mass per unit volume on average in that form as there is in the form of ordinary matter. Ordinary matter is principally in the form of protons and neutrons, primarily as hydrogen and helium atoms and ions.

Why do we call it dark? It gives off no light. Ordinary matter gives off light, it radiates. What else gives off no light? A gravitational field stronger than predicted by existing laws.

Gravitational anomalies are seen in the outer regions of galaxies by examining galaxy rotation curves, which flatten out unexpectedly with distance from the galactic center.  They are seen in galaxy groups and clusters from measuring galaxy velocity dispersions, from X-ray observations of intracluster gas, and from gravitational lensing measurements. A dark matter component is also deduced at the cosmic scale from the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background spatial variations.

The excessive velocities due to extra acceleration are either caused by dark matter or by some departure of gravity over and above the predictions of general relativity.

Actually at high accelerations general relativity is the required model but at low accelerations Newtonian dynamics is an accurate approximation. The discrepancies arise only at very low accelerations. These excess velocities, X-ray emission, and lensing are observed only at very low accelerations, so we are basically talking about an alternative of extra gravity which is over and above the 1/r² law for Newtonian dynamics.

Alternatives to General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics

There are multiple proposed laws for modifying gravity at very low accelerations. To match observations the effect should start to kick in for accelerations less than c * H, where H is the Hubble expansion parameter and its inverse is nearly equal to the present age of the universe.

That is only around 1 part in 14 million expressed in units of centimeters per second per second. This is not something typically measurable in Earth-bound laboratories; scientists have trouble pinning down the value of the gravitational constant G to within 1 part in 10,000.

This is a rather profound coincidence, suggesting that there is something fundamental at play in the nature of gravity itself, not necessarily a rather arbitrary creation of exotic dark matter particle in the very early universe. It suggests instead that there is an additional component of gravity tied in some way to the age and state of our universe.

Do you think of general relativity as the last word on gravity? From an Occam’s razor point of view it is actually simpler to think about modifying the laws of gravity in very low acceleration environments, than to postulate an exotic never-seen-in-the-lab dark matter particle. And we already know that general relativity is incomplete, since it is not a quantum theory.

The emergent gravity concept neatly solves the quantum issue by saying gravity is not fundamental in the way that electromagnetism and the nuclear forces are. Rather it is described as an emergent property of a system due to quantum entanglement of fields and particles. In this view, the fabric of space also arises from this entanglement. Gravity is a statistical property of the system, the entropy (in thermodynamic terms) of entanglement at each point.

Dark Energy

Now we have a necessary aside on dark energy. Do you know that dark energy is on firmer standing now than dark matter? And do you know that dark energy is just described by additional energy and pressure components in the stress-energy tensor, fully described within general relativity?

We know that dark energy dominates over dark matter in the canonical cosmological model (Lambda-Cold Dark Matter) for the universe. The canonical model has about 2/3 dark energy and the solution for the universe’s expansion approximates a de Sitter model in general relativity with an exponential ‘runaway’ expansion.

Dark Gravity

As we discuss this no dark matter alternative, we refer to it as dark gravity, or dark acceleration. Regardless of the nature of dark matter and dark gravity, the combination of ordinary gravity and dark gravity is still insufficient to halt the expansion of the universe. In this view, the dark gravity is due to ordinary matter, there is just more of it (gravity) than we expect, again only for the very low c * H or lower acceleration environments.

Some of the proposed laws for modified gravity are:

1. MOND – Modified Newtonian Dynamics, from Milgrom
2. Emergent gravity, from Verlinde
3. Metric skew tensor gravity (MSTG), from Moffat (and also the more recent variant scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG), sometimes called MOG (Modified gravity)

Think of the dark gravity as an additional term in the equations, beyond the gravity we are familiar with. Each of the models adds an additional term to Newtonian gravity, that only becomes significant for accelerations less than c*H. The details vary between the proposed alternatives. All do a good job of matching galaxy rotation curves for spiral galaxies and the Tully-Fisher relation that can be used for analyzing elliptical galaxies.

Things are trickier in clusters of galaxies, which are observed for galaxy velocity dispersions, X-ray emission of intracluster gas, and gravitational lensing. The MOND model appears to come up short by a factor of about two in explaining the total dark gravity implied.

Emergent gravity and modified gravity theories including MSTG claim to be able to match the observations in clusters.

Clusters of Galaxies

Most galaxies are found in groups and clusters.

Clusters and groups form from the collapse of overdense regions of hydrogen and helium gas in the early universe. Collapsing under its own gravity, such a region will heat up via frictional processes and cooler sub-regions will collapse further to form galaxies within the cluster.

Rich clusters have hundreds, even thousands of galaxies, and their gravitational potential is so high that the gas is heated to millions of degrees via friction and shock waves and gives off X-rays. The X-ray emission from clusters has been actively studied since the 1970s, via satellite experiments.

What is found is that most matter is in the form of intracluster gas, not galaxies. Some of this is left over primordial gas that never formed galaxies and some is gas that was once in a galaxy but expelled via energetic processes, especially supernovae.

Observations indicate that around 90% of (ordinary) matter is in the form of intracluster gas, and only around 10% within the galaxies in the form of stars or interstellar gas and dust. Thus modeling the mass profile of a cluster is best done by looking at how the X-ray emission falls off as one moves away from the center of a cluster.

In their 2005 paper, Brownstein and Moffat compiled X-ray emission profiles and fit gas mass profiles with radius and temperature profiles for 106 galaxy clusters. They aggregated data from a sample of 106 clusters and find that an MSTG model can reproduce the X-ray emission with a mass profile that does not require dark matter.

The figure below shows the average profile of cumulative mass interior to a given radius. The mass is in units of solar masses and runs into the hundreds of trillions. The average radius extends to over 1000 Kiloparsecs or over 1 Megaparsec (a parsec is 3.26 light-years).

The bottom line is that emergent gravity and MSTG both claim to have explanatory power without any dark matter for observations of galaxy rotation curves, gravitation lensing in clusters (Brower et al. 2016), and cluster mass profiles deduced from the X-ray emission from hot gas.

Figure 2 from J.R. Brownstein and J.W. Moffat (2005), “Galaxy Cluster Masses without Non-Baryonic Dark Matter”. Shown is cumulative mass required as a function of radius. The red curve is the average of X-ray observations from a sample of 106 clusters. The black curve is the authors’ model assuming MSTG, a good match. The cyan curve is the MOND model, the blue curve is a Newtonian model, and both require dark matter. The point is that the authors can match observations with much less matter and there is no need to postulate additional exotic dark matter.

What we would very much like to see is a better explanation of the cosmic microwave background density perturbation spectrum for the cosmic scale, for either of these dark gravity models. The STVG variant of MSTG claims to address those observations as well, without the need for dark matter.

In future posts we may look at that issue and also the so called ‘silver bullet’ that dark matter proponents often promote, the Bullet Cluster, that consists of two galaxy clusters colliding and a claimed separation of dark matter and gas.

References

Brower, M. et al. 2016, “First test of Verlinde’s theory of Emergent Gravity using Weak Gravitational Lensing Measurements” https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03034v2

Brownstein, J. and Moffat, J. 2005, “Galaxy Cluster Masses without Non-baryonic Dark Matter”, https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507222

Perrenod, S. 1977 “The Evolution of Cluster X-ray Sources” http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978ApJ…226..566P, thesis.

https://darkmatterdarkenergy.com/2018/09/19/matter-and-energy-tell-spacetime-how-to-be-dark-gravity/

https://darkmatterdarkenergy.com/2016/12/30/emergent-gravity-verlindes-proposal/

https://darkmatterdarkenergy.com/2016/12/09/modified-newtonian-dynamics-is-there-something-to-it/

Dark Energy Survey First Results: Canonical Cosmology Supported

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) first year results, and a series of papers, were released on August 4, 2017. This is a massive international collaboration with over 60 institutions represented and 200 authors on the paper summarizing initial results. Over 5 years the Dark Energy Survey team plans to survey some 300 million galaxies.

The instrument is the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera installed on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory 4-meter Blanco Telescope.

Image: DECam imager with CCDs (blue) in place. Credit: darkenergysurvey.org

Over 26 million source galaxy measurements from far, far away are included in these initial results. Typical distances are several billion light-years, up to 9 billion light-years. Also included is a sample of 650,000 luminous red galaxies, lenses for the gravitational lensing, and typically these are foreground elliptical galaxies. These are at redshifts < 0.9 corresponding to up to 7 billion light-years.

They use 3 main methods to make cosmological measurements with the sample:

1. The correlations of galaxy positions (galaxy-galaxy clustering)

2. The gravitational lensing of the large sample of background galaxies by the smaller foreground population (cosmic shear)

3. The gravitational lensing of the luminous red galaxies (galaxy-galaxy lensing)

Combining these three methods provides greater interpretive power, and is very effective in eliminating nuisance parameters and systematic errors. The signals being teased out from the large samples are at only the one to ten parts in a thousand level.

They determine 7 cosmological parameters including the overall mass density (including dark matter), the baryon mass density, the neutrino mass density, the Hubble constant, and the equation of state parameter for dark energy. They also determine the spectral index and characteristic amplitude of density fluctuations.

Their results indicate Ωm of 0.28 to a few percent, indicating that the universe is 28% dark matter and 72% dark energy. They find a dark energy equation of state w = – 0.80 but with error bars such that the result is consistent with either a cosmological constant interpretation of w = -1 or a somewhat softer equation of state.

They compare the DES results with those from the Planck satellite for the cosmic microwave background and find they are statistically significant with each other and with the Λ-Cold Dark MatterΛ model (Λ, or Lambda, stands for the cosmological constant). They also compare to other galaxy correlation measurements known as BAO for Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (very large scale galaxy structure reflecting the characteristic scale of sound waves in the pre-cosmic microwave background plasma) and to Type 1a supernovae data.

This broad agreement with Planck results is a significant finding since the cosmic microwave background is at very early times, redshift z = 1100 and their galaxy sample is at more recent times, after the first five billion years had elapsed, with z < 1.4 and more typically when the universe was roughly ten billion years old.

Upon combining with Planck, BAO, and the supernovae data the best fit is Ωm of 0.30 with an error of less than 0.01, the most precise determination to date. Of this, about 0.25 is ascribed to dark matter and 0.05 to ordinary matter (baryons). And the implied dark energy fraction is 0.70.

Furthermore, the combined result for the equation of state parameter is precisely w = -1.00 with only one percent uncertainty.

The figure below is Figure 9 from the DES paper. The figure indicates, in the leftmost column the measures and error bars for the amplitude of primordial density fluctuations, in the center column the fraction of mass-energy density in matter, and in the right column the equation of state parameter w.

The DES year one results for all 3 methods are shown in the first row. The Planck plus BAO plus supernovae combined results are shown in the last row. And the middle row, the fifth row, shows all of the experiments combined, statistically. Note the values of 0.3 and – 1.0 for Ωm and w, respectively, and the extremely small error bars associated with these.

This represents continued strong support for the canonical Λ-Cold Dark Matter cosmology, with unvarying dark energy described by a cosmological constant.

They did not evaluate modifications to general relativity such as Emergent Gravity or MOND with respect to their data, but suggest they will evaluate such a possibility in the future.

References

https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01530, “Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing”, 2017, T. Abbott et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_gravitational_lensing, Wikipedia article on weak gravitational lensing discusses galaxy-galaxy lensing and cosmic shear

The Curiously Tangential Dwarf Galaxies

There are some 50 or so satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, the most famous of which are the Magellanic Clouds. Somewhat incredibly, half of these have been discovered within the last 2 years, since they are small, faint, and have low surface brightness. The image below shows only the well known ‘classical’ satellites. The satellites are categorized primarily as dwarf spheroidals, and most are low in gas content.

Image credit: Wikipedia, Richard Powell, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

“Satellite galaxies that orbit from 1,000 ly (310 pc) of the edge of the disc of the Milky Way Galaxy to the edge of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way at 980×103 ly (300 kpc) from the center of the galaxy, are generally depleted in hydrogen gas compared to those that orbit more distantly. The reason is the dense hot gas halo of the Milky Way, which strips cold gas from the satellites. Satellites beyond that region still retain copious quantities of gas.

In a recent paper “The tangential velocity excess of the Milky Way satellites“, Marius Cautun and Carlos Frenk find that a sample of satellites (drawn from those known for more than a few years) deviates from the predictions of the canonical Λ – Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDMcosmology. (Λ refers to the cosmological constant, or dark energy).

“We estimate the systemic orbital kinematics of the Milky Way classical satellites and compare them with predictions from the Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model derived from a semi-analytical galaxy formation model applied to high resolution cosmological N-body simulations. We find that the Galactic satellite system is atypical of ΛCDM systems. The subset of 10 Galactic satellites with proper motion measurements has a velocity anisotropy, β = −2.2 ± 0.4, that lies in the 2.9% tail of the ΛCDM distribution. Individually, the Milky Way satellites have radial velocities that are lower than expected for their proper motions, with 9 out of the 10 having at most 20% of their orbital kinetic energy invested in radial motion. Such extreme values are expected in only 1.5% of ΛCDM satellites systems. This tangential motion excess is unrelated to the existence of a Galactic ‘disc of satellites’. We present theoretical predictions for larger satellite samples that may become available as more proper motion measurements are obtained.”

Radial velocities are easy, we get those from redshifts. Tangential velocities are much tougher, but can be obtained from relatively nearby objects by measuring their proper motions. That is, how much do their apparent positions change on the sky after many years have passed. It’s all the more tough when your object is not a point object, but a fuzzy galaxy!

For a ‘random’ distribution of velocities in accordance with ΛCDM cosmology, one would expect the two components of tangential velocity to be each roughly equal on average to the radial component, and thus 2/3 of the kinetic energy would be tangential and 1/3 would be radial. But rather than 33% of the kinetic energy being in radial motion, they find that the Galactic satellites have only about 1/2 that amount in radial, and over 80% of their kinetic energy in tangential motion.

Formally, they find a negative velocity anistropy, β, which as it is defined in practice, should be around zero for a ΛCDM distribution. They find that β differs from zero by 5 standard deviations.

One possible explanation is that the dwarf galaxies are mainly at their perigee or apogee points of their orbits. But why should this be the case? Another explanation: “alternatively indicate that the Galactic satellites have orbits that are, on average, closer to circular than is typical in ΛCDM. This would mean that MW halo mass estimates based on satellite orbits (e.g. Barber et al. 2014) are biased low.” Perhaps the Milky Way halo mass estimate is too low. Or, they also posit, without elaborating, do the excess tangential motions “indicate new physics in the dark sector”?

So one speculation is that the tangential motions are reflective of emergent gravity class of theories, for which dark matter is not required, but for which the gravitational force changes (strengthens) at low accelerations, of order $c \cdot H$, where H is the Hubble parameter, and the value works out to be around 2 centimeters per second per year. And it does this in a way that ‘spoofs’ the existence and gravitational affect of dark matter. This is also what is argued for in Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which is an empirical observation about galaxy light curves.

In the next article of this series we will look at Erik Verlinde’s emergent gravity proposal, which he has just enhanced, and will attempt to explain it as best we can. If you want to prepare yourself for this challenging adventure, first read his 2011 paper, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton”.

Dark Sector Experiments

A dark energy experiment was recently searching for a so-called scalar “chameleon field”. Chameleon particles could be an explanation for dark energy. They would have to make the field strength vanishingly small when they are in regions of significant matter density, coupling to matter more weakly than does gravity. But in low-density regions, say between the galaxies, the chameleon particle would exert a long range force.

Chameleons can decay to photons, so that provides a way to detect them, if they actually exist.

Chameleon particles were originally suggested by Justin Khoury of the University of Pennsylvania and another physicist around 2003. Now Khoury and Holger Muller and collaborators at UC Berkeley have performed an experiment which pushed millions of cesium atoms toward an aluminum sphere in a vacuum chamber. By changing the orientation in which the experiment is performed, the researchers can correct for the effects of gravity and compare the putative chameleon field strength to gravity.

If there were a chameleon field, then the cesium atoms should accelerate at different rates depending on the orientation, but no difference was found. The level of precision of this experiment is such that only chameleons that interact very strongly with matter have been ruled out. The team is looking to increase the precision of the experiment by additional orders of magnitude.

For now the simplest explanation for dark energy is the cosmological constant (or energy of the vacuum) as Einstein proposed almost 100 years ago.

The Large Underground Xenon experiment to detect dark matter (CC BY 3.0)

“Dark radiation” has been hypothesized for some time by some physicists. In this scenario there would be a “dark electromagnetic” force and dark matter particles could annihilate into dark photons or other dark sector particles when two dark matter particles collide with one another. This would happen infrequently, since dark matter is much more diffusely distributed than ordinary matter.

Ordinary matter clumps since it undergoes frictional and ordinary radiation processes, emitting photons. This allows it to cool it off and to become more dense under mutual gravitational forces. Dark matter rarely decays or interacts, and does not interact electromagnetically, thus no friction or ordinary radiation occurs. Essentially dark matter helps ordinary matter clump together initially since it dominates on the large scales, but on small scales ordinary matter will be dominant in certain regions. Thus the density of dark matter in the solar system is very low.

Earthbound dark matter detectors have focused on direct interaction of dark matter with atomic nuclei for the signal. John Cherry and co-authors have suggested that dark matter may not interact directly, but rather it first annihilates to light particles, which then scatter on the atomic nuclei used as targets in the direct detection experiments.

So in this scenario dark matter particles annihilate when they encounter each other, producing dark radiation, and then the dark radiation can be detected by currently existing direct detection experiments. If this is the main channel for detection, then much lower mass dark matter particles can be observed, down to of order 10 MeV (million electron-Volts), whereas current direct detection is focused on masses of several GeV (billion electron-Volts) to 100 GeV or more. (The proton rest mass is about 1 GeV)

A Nobel Prize awaits, most likely, the first unambiguous direct detection of either dark matter, or dark energy, if it is even possible.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chameleon_particle – Chameleon particle

http://scitechdaily.com/physicists-work-on-new-approach-to-detect-dark-matter/ – article on detecting dark matter generated dark radiation

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.231303 – Cherry et al. paper in Physical Review Letters

Planck 2015 Constraints on Dark Energy and Inflation

The European Space Agency’s Planck satellite gathered data for over 4 years, and a series of 28 papers releasing the results and evaluating constraints on cosmological models have been recently released. In general, the Planck mission’s complete results confirm the canonical cosmological model, known as Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or ΛCDM. In approximate percentage terms the Planck 2015 results indicate 69% dark energy, 26% dark matter, and 5% ordinary matter as the mass-energy components of the universe (see this earlier blog:

Dark Energy

We know that dark energy is the dominant force in the universe, comprising 69% of the total energy content. And it exerts a negative pressure causing the expansion to continuously speed up. The universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is even accelerating! What dark energy is we do not know, but the simplest explanation is that it is the energy of empty space, of the vacuum. Significant departures from this simple model are not supported by observations.

The dark energy equation of state is the relation between the pressure exerted by dark energy and its energy density. Planck satellite measurements are able to constrain the dark energy equation of state significantly. Consistent with earlier measurements of this parameter, which is usually denoted as w, the Planck Consortium has determined that w = -1 to within 4 or 5 percent (95% confidence).

According to the Planck Consortium, “By combining the Planck TT+lowP+lensing data with other astrophysical data, including the JLA supernovae, the equation of state for dark energy is constrained to w = −1.006 ± 0.045 and is therefore compatible with a cosmological constant, assumed in the base ΛCDM cosmology.”

A value of -1 for w corresponds to a simple Cosmological constant model with a single parameter Λ  that is the present-day energy density of empty space, the vacuum. The Λ value measured to be 0.69 is normalized to the critical mass-energy density. Since the vacuum is permeated by various fields, its energy density is non-zero. (The critical mass-energy density is that which results in a topologically flat space-time for the universe; it is the equivalent of 5.2 proton masses per cubic meter.)

Such a model has a negative pressure, which leads to the accelerated expansion that has been observed for the universe; this acceleration was first discovered in 1998 by two teams using certain supernova as standard candle distance indicators, and measuring their luminosity as a function of redshift distance.

Modified gravity

The phrase modified gravity refers to models that depart from general relativity. To date, general relativity has passed every test thrown at it, on scales from the Earth to the universe as a whole. The Planck Consortium has also explored a number of modified gravity models with extensions to general relativity. They are able to tighten the restrictions on such models, and find that overall there is no need for modifications to general relativity to explain the data from the Planck satellite.

Primordial density fluctuations

The Planck data are consistent with a model of primordial density fluctuations that is close to, but not precisely, scale invariant. These are the fluctuations which gave rise to overdensities in dark matter and ordinary matter that eventually collapsed to form galaxies and the observed large scale structure of the universe.

The concept is that the spectrum of density fluctuations is a simple power law of the form

P(k) ∝ k**(ns−1),

where k is the wave number (the inverse of the wavelength scale). The Planck observations are well fit by such a power law assumption. The measured spectral index of the perturbations has a slight tilt away from 1, with the existence of the tilt being valid to more than 5 standard deviations of accuracy.

ns = 0.9677 ± 0.0060

The existence and amount of this tilt in the spectral index has implications for inflationary models.

Inflation

The Planck Consortium authors have evaluated a wide range of potential inflationary models against the data products, including the following categories:

• Power law
• Hilltop
• Natural
• D-brane
• Exponential
• Spontaneously broken supersymmetry
• Alpha attractors
• Non-minimally coupled

Figure 12 from Planck 2015 results XX Constraints on Inflation. The Planck 2015 data constraints are shown with the red and blue contours. Steeper models with  V ~ φ³ or V ~ φ² appear ruled out, whereas R² inflation looks quite attractive.

Their results appear to rule out some of these, although many models remain consistent with the data. Power law models with indices greater or equal to 2 appear to be ruled out. Simple slow roll models such as R² inflation, which is actually the first inflationary model proposed 35 years ago, appears more favored than others. Brane inflation and exponential inflation are also good fits to the data. Again, many other models still remain statistically consistent with the data.

Simple models with a few parameters characterizing the inflation suffice:

“Firstly, under the assumption that the inflaton* potential is smooth over the observable range, we showed that the simplest parametric forms (involving only three free parameters including the amplitude V (φ∗ ), no deviation from slow roll, and nearly power-law primordial spectra) are sufficient to explain the data. No high-order derivatives or deviations from slow roll are required.”

* The inflaton is the name cosmologists give to the inflation field

“Among the models considered using this approach, the R2 inflationary model proposed by Starobinsky (1980) is the most preferred. Due to its high tensor- to-scalar ratio, the quadratic model is now strongly disfavoured with respect to R² inflation for Planck TT+lowP in combination with BAO data. By combining with the BKP likelihood, this trend is confirmed, and natural inflation is also disfavoured.”

Isocurvature and tensor components

They also evaluate whether the cosmological perturbations are purely adiabatic, or include an additional isocurvature component as well. They find that an isocurvature component would be small, less than 2% of the overall perturbation strength. A single scalar inflaton field with adiabatic perturbations is sufficient to explain the Planck data.

They find that the tensor-to-scalar ratio is less than 9%, which again rules out or constrains certain models of inflation.

Summary

The simplest LambdaCDM model continues to be quite robust, with the dark energy taking the form of a simple cosmological constant. It’s interesting that one of the oldest and simplest models for inflation, characterized by a power law relating the potential to the inflaton amplitude, and dating from 35 years ago, is favored by the latest Planck results. A value for the power law index of less than 2 is favored. All things being equal, Occam’s razor should lead us to prefer this sort of simple model for the universe’s early history. Models with slow-roll evolution throughout the inflationary epoch appear to be sufficient.

The universe started simply, but has become highly structured and complex through various evolutionary processes.

References

Planck Consortium 2015 papers are at http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/planck/publications – This site links to the 28 papers for the 2015 results, as well as earlier publications. Especially relevant are these – XIII Cosmological parameters, XIV Dark energy and modified gravity, and XX Constraints on inflation.

Dark Matter Bridge Discovered

A team of astronomers claims to have detected an enormous bridge or filament of dark matter, with a mass estimated to be of order 100 trillion solar masses, and connecting two clusters of galaxies. The two clusters, known as Abell 222 and Abell 223, are about 2.8 billion light-years away and separated from one another by 400 million light-years. Each cluster has around 150 galaxies; actually one of the pair is itself a double cluster.

Clusters of galaxies are gravitationally bound collections of hundreds to a thousand or more galaxies. Often a cluster will be found in the vicinity of other clusters to which it is also gravitationally bound. The universe as a whole is gravitationally unbound – the matter, including the dark matter – is insufficient to stop the continued expansion, which is driven to acceleration in fact, by dark energy.

Figure: Subaru telescope optical photo with mass density shown in blue and statistical significance contours superimposed. In the filament area found near the center of the image, the contours indicate four standard deviations of significance in the detection of dark matter. The cluster Abell 222 is in the south, and Abell 223 is the double cluster in the north of the image. The distance between the two clusters is about 14 arc-minutes, or about ½ the apparent size of the Moon.

Dark matter was originally called “missing matter”, and was first posited by Fritz Zwicky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky) in the 1930s because of his studies of the kinematics of galaxies and galaxy clusters. He measured the velocities of galaxies moving around inside a cluster and found they were significantly greater than expected from the amount of ordinary matter seen in the galaxies themselves. This implied there was more matter than seen in galaxies because the velocities of the galaxies would be determined by the total gravitational field in a cluster, and the questions have been where is, and what is, the “missing matter” inferred by the gravitational effects. X-ray emission has been detected from most clusters of galaxies, and this is due to an additional component of matter outside of galaxies, namely hot gas between galaxies. But it is still insufficient to explain the total mass of clusters as revealed by both the galaxy velocities and the temperature of the hot gas itself, since both are a reflection of the gravitational field in the cluster.

Dark matter is ubiquitous, found on all scales and is generally less clumped than ordinary matter, so it is not surprising that significant dark matter would be found between two associated galaxy clusters. In fact the researchers in this study point out that “It is a firm prediction of the concordance Cold Dark Matter cosmological model that galaxy clusters live at the intersection of large-scale structure filaments.”

The technique used to map the dark matter is gravitational lensing, which is a result of general relativity. The gravitational lensing effect is well established; it has been seen in many clusters of galaxies to date. In gravitational lensing, light is deflected away from a straight-line path by matter in its vicinity.

In this case the gravitational field of the dark matter filament and the galaxy clusters deflect light passing nearby. The image of a background galaxy located behind the cluster will be distorted as the light moves through or nearby the foreground cluster. The amount of distortion depends on the mass of the cluster (or dark matter bridge) and how near the line of sight passes to the cluster center.

There is also a well-detected bridge of ordinary matter in the form of hot X-ray emitting gas connecting the two clusters and in the same location as the newly discovered dark matter bridge.  The scientists used observations from the XMM-Newton satellite to map the X-ray emission from the two clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223 and the hot gas bridge connecting them. Because of the strong gravitational fields of galaxy clusters, the gas interior to galaxy clusters (but exterior to individual galaxies within the cluster) is heated to very high temperatures by frictional processes, resulting in thermal X-ray emission from the clusters.

The research team, led by Jörg Dietrich at the University of Michigan, then performed a gravitational lensing analysis, focusing on the location of the bridge as determined from the X-ray observations. The gravitational lensing work is based on optical observations obtained from the Subaru telescope (operated by the Japanese government, but located on the Big Island of Hawaii) to map the total matter density profile around and between the two clusters. This method detects the sum of dark matter and ordinary matter.

They analyzed the detailed orientations and shapes of over forty thousand background galaxies observable behind the two clusters and the bridge. This work allowed them to determine the contours of the dark matter distribution. They state a 98% confidence in the existence of a bridge or filament dominated by dark matter.

The amount of dark matter is shown to be much larger than that of ordinary matter, representing over 90% of the total in the filament region, so the gravitational lensing effects are primarily due to the dark matter. Less than 9% of the mass in the filament is in the form of hot gas (ordinary matter). The estimated total mass in the filament is about 1/3 of the mass of either of the galaxy clusters, each of which is also dominated by dark matter.

Observations of galaxy distributions show that galaxies are found in groups, clusters, and filaments connecting regions of galaxy concentration. Cosmological simulations of the evolution of the universe on supercomputers indicate that the distribution of dark matter should have a filamentary structure as well. So although the result is in many ways not surprising, it represents the first detection of such a structure to date.

References:

http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/20623-dark-matter-scaffolding-of-universe-detected-for-the-first-time – press release from the University of Michigan

http://www.gizmag.com/dark-matter-filaments-found/23281/ “Dark matter filaments detected for the first time”

J. Dietrich et al. 2012 http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0809 “A filament of dark matter between two clusters of galaxies”

Foreword, by Rich Brueckner

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

— Alan Watts

We all know of the Big Bang, how our universe came to be in a massive explosion, seemingly starting from nothingness. And for those who study cosmology, further understanding requires us to define the dark energies that somehow endowed our world with order.

Now, we haven’t observed dark energy, dark matter, and the secrets of dark gravity directly, but we do see their effects. As we learn in this book, without them, the universe would not have formed in a way that could have spawned intelligent life.

As a writer, I am intrigued by these dark energies because they imply a backstory–phenomena that happened first that led to this outcome. So in this way, dark energies seem to me to be metaphors of science. Like the stories of Genesis and Adam and Eve, what they really represent is a deeper truth.

In this book, Dr. Perrenod does a wonderful job of explaining the origins of the universe in way that is accessible to the layman. When you want to understand how the universe came to be, you ask an astrophysicist. But when you really want to know why, I think you have to start by asking yourself some questions. Try a thought experiment.

Put yourself in the place of a Universal Mind before the Big Bang. If you really wanted to understand yourself, you would need to have something intelligent outside of yourself that could experience that which is you. Not to get metaphysical here, but if we were at the scene of a crime, what I’d be suggesting here is motive.

Thanks to modern physics and cosmology, we no longer live in a universe where dark forces lurk far beyond our capacity for comprehension. I believe that, through the works of Stephen Perrenod and others, we will come to that knowing. But even as we look out to the stars, I think it begins with understanding that not only are we within the universe, but the universe is within us.

Rich Brueckner is President of insideHPC.com

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Gravity

Enabling a Universe that Supports Intelligent Life

Author: Stephen Perrenod

An e-book now available through:

We are immersed in a sea of light emanating from ordinary matter that is floating, as it were, on an ocean of dark matter. The dark matter itself floats on the dark energy of the particle vacuum that in turn is in embedded within the scaffolding of space-time – which is shaped by the dark gravity effects from all matter and energy.

• Dedication
• Foreword (by Rich Brueckner)
• Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Scale of the Universe
2. The Big Bang Model
3. Inflation
4. Dark Matter
5. Dark Energy
6. Dark Gravity
7. Future of the Universe
• Glossary
• References, Suggested Reading and Viewing