May 4, 2024

How To See the Invisible: Measuring Dark Matter With Hyper Suprime-Cam Reveals Discrepancy

A global group of cosmologists and astrophysicists have actually spent the past year teasing out the tricks of this elusive product, utilizing advanced computer system simulations and the observations from the one of the most powerful huge cameras in the world, the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). The group is led by astronomers from Princeton University and the huge communities of Japan and Taiwan, using information from the first three years of the HSC sky study, a wide-field imaging survey carried out with the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope on the top of Maunakea in Hawaii. Subaru is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; its name is the Japanese word for the cluster of stars we call the Pleiades.
The team is now submitting a set of five documents outlining their findings.
An example of an image gotten with HSC-SSP. Credit: HSC-SSP job & & NAOJ
” Our total goal is to determine some of the most essential homes of our universe,” stated Roohi Dalal, very first author on among the documents and a graduate student in astrophysics at Princeton. “We know that dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of our universe, however we comprehend very little about what they in fact are and how theyve evolved over the history of deep space. Clumps of dark matter distort the light of remote galaxies through weak gravitational lensing, a phenomenon anticipated by Einsteins General Theory of Relativity. This distortion is an actually, really little effect; the shape of a single galaxy is misshaped by an invisible amount. When we make that measurement for 25 million galaxies, were able to measure the distortion with quite high accuracy.” To leap to the punchline: The team has actually measured a value for the “clumpiness” of the universes dark matter (known to cosmologists as “S8”) of 0.776, which lines up with values that other gravitational lensing studies have found in taking a look at the fairly current universe– but it does not line up with the value of 0.83 originated from the Cosmic Microwave Background, which goes back to the universes origins.
The measurement results of S8 specification from HSC-SSP Year 3 information. The chart shows the results from 4 different methods, which used various parts of the HSC-SSP Year 3 information or combined the HSC-SSP Year 3 data with other information. “Other weak lensing outcomes” shows the results from comparable weak lensing measurements based on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) data.
” Were still being fairly cautious here,” stated Michael Strauss, chair of Princetons Department of Astrophysical Sciences and one of the leaders of the HSC team. “Were not saying that weve just found that contemporary cosmology is all incorrect, due to the fact that, as Roohi has stressed, the effect that were measuring is an extremely subtle one. The concept that some change is required in the basic cosmological design, that there is some fundamental piece of cosmology yet to be discovered, is a delightfully luring one for some scientists.
” We are humans, and we do have preferences. Thats why we do what we call a blinded analysis,” Strauss stated. “Scientists have actually become self-aware enough to know that we will bias ourselves, no matter how cautious we are, unless we perform our analysis without permitting ourselves to know the outcomes till completion. For me, I would love to really find something essentially brand-new. That would be truly exciting. Since I am prejudiced in that direction, we desire to be extremely cautious not to let that influence any analysis that we do.” To secure their work from their biases, they quite actually hid their outcomes from themselves and their coworkers– month after month after month.
” I dealt with this analysis for a year and didnt get to see the worths that were coming out,” stated Dalal.
The group even added an additional obfuscating layer: they ran their analyses on 3 different galaxy catalogs, one real and 2 with mathematical values offset by random worths.
” We didnt know which of them was genuine, so even if somebody did unintentionally see the worths, we would not understand if the results were based on the genuine catalog or not,” she said.
On February 16, the international group collected together on Zoom– at night in Princeton, in the early morning in Japan and Taiwan– for the “unblinding.”.
” It felt like an event, a routine, that we went through,” Strauss said. “We unveiled the data, and ran our plots, immediately we saw it was great. Everybody went, Oh, whew! and everyone was extremely delighted.”.
Dalal and her roommate popped a bottle of champagne that night.
A big study with the worlds biggest telescope cam.
HSC is the biggest cam on a telescope of its size in the world, a mantle it will hold until the Vera C. Rubin Observatory currently under building in the Chilean Andes, begins the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in late 2024. In reality, the raw data from HSC is processed with the software application designed for LSST. “It is fascinating to see that our software pipelines have the ability to deal with such big amounts of information well ahead of LSST,” said Andrés Plazas, a co-author on the documents and an associate research study scholar at Princeton.
The study that the research study team utilized covers about 420 square degrees of the sky, about the equivalent of 2000 moons. Its not a single adjoining portion of sky, however split among 6 different pieces, each about the size that you could cover with an outstretched fist. The 25 million galaxies they surveyed are so distant that instead of seeing these galaxies as they are today, the HSC taped how they were billions of years ago.
An example of a 3D circulation of dark matter originated from HSC-SSP. This map is acquired by using the first years information, however today research study analyzed a location on the sky about 3 times bigger than that. Credit: University of Tokyo/NAOJ.
Each of these galaxies glows with the fires of tens of billions of suns, but since they are up until now away, they are exceptionally faint, as much as 25 million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye.
” It is extremely interesting to see these arise from HSC partnership, specifically as this information is closest to what we get out of Rubin Observatory, which the community is working towards together,” stated cosmologist Alexandra Amon, a Senior Kavli Fellow at Cambridge University and a senior researcher at Trinity College, who was not associated with this research. “Their deep study makes for gorgeous data. For me, it is appealing that HSC, like the other independent weak lensing surveys, indicate a low value for S8– its crucial validation, and interesting that these stress and trends require us to pause and think about what that data is informing us about our Universe!”.
The standard cosmological model.
The basic model of cosmology is “remarkably simple” in some ways, discussed Andrina Nicola of the University of Bonn, who encouraged Dalal on this project when she was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton. The design posits that the universe is comprised of only four fundamental constituents: regular matter (atoms, primarily hydrogen and helium), dark matter, dark energy and photons.
According to the basic model, deep space has been expanding given that the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago: it started nearly perfectly smooth, but the pull of gravity on the subtle changes in the universe has caused structure– galaxies enveloped in dark matter clumps– to form. In the contemporary universe, the relative contributions of common matter, dark matter, dark energy are about 5%, 25% and 70%, plus a tiny contribution from photons.
The basic design is defined by just a handful of numbers: the expansion rate of deep space; a measure of how clumpy the dark matter is (S8); the relative contributions of the constituents of the universe (the 5%, 25%, 70% numbers above); the total density of the universe; and a technical amount explaining how the clumpiness of deep space on big scales connects to that on small scales.
” And thats basically it!” Strauss stated. “We, the cosmological community, have actually converged on this model, which has been in place since the early 2000s.”.
Cosmologists are excited to evaluate this design by constraining these numbers in numerous methods, such as by observing the fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (which in essence is the universes infant image, capturing how it cared for its very first 400,000 years), modeling the growth history of the universe, determining the clumpiness of deep space in the fairly current past, and others.
” Were confirming a growing sense in the neighborhood that there is a real inconsistency between the measurement of clumping in the early universe (measured from the CMB) which from the era of galaxies, only 9 billion years ago,” stated Arun Kannawadi, an associate research study scholar at Princeton who was involved in the analysis.
The five documents.
Dalals paper is among 5 being submitted collectively to Physical Review D on this topic. Her paper does a so-called Fourier-space analysis; a parallel real-space analysis was led by Xiangchong Li of Carnegie Mellon University. Li is operating in close partnership with Rachel Mandelbaum, who completed her physics A.B. in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2006, both from Princeton. A 3rd analysis, a so-called 3 × 2-point analysis, takes a different approach of determining the gravitational lensing signal around individual galaxies, to adjust the amount of dark matter associated with each galaxy. That analysis is described in 3 papers led by Sunao Sugiyama of the University of Tokyo, Hironao Miyatake (a former Princeton postdoctoral fellow) of Nagoya University and Surhud More of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. These five papers together use the HSC information to come to the exact same conclusion about S8.
Doing both the real-space analysis and the Fourier-space analysis “was sort of a peace of mind check,” stated Dalal. She and Li worked carefully to collaborate their analyses, utilizing blinded data.
” We didnt know until the unblinding that two results were bang-on identical,” she stated. “It felt miraculous.”.
Sunao included: “Our 3 × 2-point analysis combines the weak lensing analysis with the clustering of galaxies. Just after unblinding did we understand that our results remained in lovely agreement with those of Roohi and Xiangchong. The truth that all these analyses are giving the very same response gives us self-confidence that were doing something right!”.
Referrals:.
” Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing with HSC and SDSS utilizing the Emulator Based Halo Model” by Hironao Miyatake, Sunao Sugiyama, Masahiro Takada, Takahiro Nishimichi, Xiangchong Li, Masato Shirasaki, Surhud More, Yosuke Kobayashi, Atsushi J. Nishizawa, Markus M. Rau, Tianqing Zhang, Ryuichi Takahashi, Roohi Dalal, Rachel Mandelbaum, Michael A. Strauss, Takashi Hamana, Masamune Oguri, Ken Osato, Wentao Luo, Arun Kannawadi, Bau-Ching Hsieh, Robert Armstrong, Yutaka Komiyama, Robert H. Lupton, Nate B. Lust, Lauren A. MacArthur, Satoshi Miyazaki, Hitoshi Murayama, Yuki Okura, Paul A. Price, Tomomi Sunayama, Philip J. Tait, Masayuki Tanaka and Shiang-Yu Wang, 3 April 2023, Astrophysics > > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.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 utilizing 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.
This research study was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE-2039656); the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe; the University of Tokyo; the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK); the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan; Princeton University; the FIRST program from the Japanese Cabinet Office; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT); the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; the Japan Science and Technology Agency; the Toray Science Foundation; and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

A worldwide group of astrophysicists and cosmologists, utilizing the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), among the worlds most effective huge electronic cameras, and data from the very first three years of the HSC sky survey, have spent the previous year studying dark matter.
Using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), a group led by Princeton University has actually studied the circulation of dark matter and found a disparity in between the clumpiness (S8 worth) of dark matter in the early universe versus the present universe. This disparity might point to an unrecognized mistake or mean an insufficient basic cosmological model.
It feels like a classical paradox: How do you see the invisible? However for modern astronomers, it is a very real difficulty: How do you determine dark matter, which by meaning discharges no light?
The response: You see how it impacts things that you can see. When it comes to dark matter, astronomers enjoy how light from remote galaxies bends around it.

The group is led by astronomers from Princeton University and the huge communities of Japan and Taiwan, using data from the first three years of the HSC sky study, a wide-field imaging survey carried out with the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. “We understand that dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of our universe, but we understand extremely little about what they really are and how theyve evolved over the history of the universe. To leap to the punchline: The group has actually measured a value for the “clumpiness” of the universes dark matter (understood to cosmologists as “S8”) of 0.776, which aligns with worths that other gravitational lensing studies have actually discovered in looking at the reasonably current universe– but it does not align with the worth of 0.83 obtained from the Cosmic Microwave Background, which dates back to the universes origins.
The measurement results of S8 parameter from HSC-SSP Year 3 data. The chart shows the outcomes from four various methods, which utilized different parts of the HSC-SSP Year 3 data or integrated the HSC-SSP Year 3 information with other data.