No Arabic abstract
Recently, the WMAP group has published their five-year data and considered the constraints on the time evolving equation of state of dark energy for the first time from the WMAP distance information. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of the usage of these distance information and find that these compressed CMB information can give similar constraints on dark energy parameters compared with the full CMB power spectrum if dark energy perturbations are included, however, once incorrectly neglecting the dark energy perturbations, the difference of the results are sizable.
Data-driven model-independent reconstructions of the dark energy equation of state $w(z)$ are presented using Planck 2015 era CMB, BAO, SNIa and Lyman-$alpha$ data. These reconstructions identify the $w(z)$ behaviour supported by the data and show a bifurcation of the equation of state posterior in the range $1.5{<}z{<}3$. Although the concordance $Lambda$CDM model is consistent with the data at all redshifts in one of the bifurcated spaces, in the other a supernegative equation of state (also known as `phantom dark energy) is identified within the $1.5 sigma$ confidence intervals of the posterior distribution. To identify the power of different datasets in constraining the dark energy equation of state, we use a novel formulation of the Kullback--Leibler divergence. This formalism quantifies the information the data add when moving from priors to posteriors for each possible dataset combination. The SNIa and BAO datasets are shown to provide much more constraining power in comparison to the Lyman-$alpha$ datasets. Further, SNIa and BAO constrain most strongly around redshift range $0.1-0.5$, whilst the Lyman-$alpha$ data constrains weakly over a broader range. We do not attribute the supernegative favouring to any particular dataset, and note that the $Lambda$CDM model was favoured at more than $2$ log-units in Bayes factors over all the models tested despite the weakly preferred $w(z)$ structure in the data.
We reconstruct the Equation of State of Dark Energy (EoS) from current data using a non-parametric approach where, rather than assuming a specific time evolution of this function, we bin it in time. We treat the transition between the bins with two different methods, i.e. a smoothed step function and a Gaussian Process reconstruction, investigating whether or not the two approaches lead to compatible results. Additionally, we include in the reconstruction procedure a correlation between the values of the EoS at different times in the form of a theoretical prior that takes into account a set of viability and stability requirements that one can impose on models alternative to $Lambda$CDM. In such case, we necessarily specialize to broad, but specific classes of alternative models, i.e. Quintessence and Horndeski gravity. We use data coming from CMB, Supernovae and BAO surveys. We find an overall agreement between the different reconstruction methods used; with both approaches, we find a time dependence of the mean of the reconstruction, with different trends depending on the class of model studied. The constant EoS predicted by the $Lambda$CDM model falls anyway within the $1sigma$ bounds of our analysis.
We combine recent measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies, Supernovae luminosity distances and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations to derive constraints on the dark energy equation of state w in the redshift range 0<z<2, using a principal components approach. We find no significant deviations from the expectations of a cosmological constant. However, combining the datasets we find slight indication for w<-1 at low redshift, thus highlighting how these datasets prefer a non-constant w. Nevertheless the cosmological constant is still in agreement with these observations, while we find that some classes of alternative models may be in tension with the inferred w(z) behaviour.
In this work we have used the recent cosmic chronometers data along with the latest estimation of the local Hubble parameter value, $H_0$ at 2.4% precision as well as the standard dark energy probes, such as the Supernovae Type Ia, baryon acoustic oscillation distance measurements, and cosmic microwave background measurements (PlanckTT $+$ lowP) to constrain a dark energy model where the dark energy is allowed to interact with the dark matter. A general equation of state of dark energy parametrized by a dimensionless parameter `$beta$ is utilized. From our analysis, we find that the interaction is compatible with zero within the 1$sigma$ confidence limit. We also show that the same evolution history can be reproduced by a small pressure of the dark matter.
We have identified three possible ways in which future XMM-Newton observations can provide significant constraints on the equation of state of neutron stars. First, using a long observation of the neutron star X-ray transient CenX-4 in quiescence one can use the RGS spectrum to constrain the interstellar extinction to the source. This removes this parameter from the X-ray spectral fitting of the pn and MOS spectra and allows us to investigate whether the variability observed in the quiescent X-ray spectrum of this source is due to variations in the soft thermal spectral component or variations in the power law spectral component coupled with variations in N_H. This will test whether the soft thermal spectral component can indeed be due to the hot thermal glow of the neutron star. Potentially such an observation could also reveal redshifted spectral lines from the neutron star surface. Second, XMM-Newton observations of radius expansion type I X-ray bursts might reveal redshifted absorption lines from the surface of the neutron star. Third, XMM-Newton observations of eclipsing quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries provide the eclipse duration. With this the system inclination can be determined accurately. The inclination determined from the X-ray eclipse duration in quiescence, the rotational velocity of the companion star and the semi-amplitude of the radial velocity curve determined through optical spectroscopy, yield the neutron star mass.