COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERING AND THE MASS-TO-NUMBER RATIO OF GALAXY CLUSTERS: MARGINALIZING OVER THE PHYSICS OF GALAXY FORMATION

Many approaches to obtaining cosmological constraints rely on the connection between galaxies and dark matter. However, the distribution of galaxies is dependent on their formation and evolution as well as on the cosmological model, and galaxy formation is still not a well-constrained process. Thus,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2014-03, Vol.783 (2), p.1-9
Main Authors: Reddick, Rachel M, Tinker, Jeremy L, Wechsler, Risa H, Lu, Yu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomical models
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
Clustering
COSMOLOGICAL MODELS
COSMOLOGY
Dark matter
DISTRIBUTION
EVOLUTION
Galactic clusters
GALAXIES
GALAXY CLUSTERS
Galaxy formation
HEAVY WATER
LIMITING VALUES
MASS
Mathematical models
NONLUMINOUS MATTER
Occupation
SENSITIVITY
SIMULATION
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Many approaches to obtaining cosmological constraints rely on the connection between galaxies and dark matter. However, the distribution of galaxies is dependent on their formation and evolution as well as on the cosmological model, and galaxy formation is still not a well-constrained process. Thus, methods that probe cosmology using galaxies as tracers for dark matter must be able to accurately estimate the cosmological parameters. This can be done without knowing details of galaxy formation a priori as long as the galaxies are well represented by a halo occupation distribution (HOD). We apply this reasoning to the method of obtaining [Omega] sub(m) and [sigma] sub(8) from galaxy clustering combined with the mass-to-number ratio of galaxy clusters. To test the sensitivity of this method to variations due to galaxy formation, we consider several different models applied to the same cosmological dark matter simulation. The cosmological parameters are then estimated using the observables in each model, marginalizing over the parameters of the HOD. We find that for models where the galaxies can be well represented by a parameterized HOD, this method can successfully extract the desired cosmological parameters for a wide range of galaxy formation prescriptions.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/783/2/118