No Arabic abstract
We speculate on the development and availability of new innovative propulsion techniques in the 2040s, that will allow us to fly a spacecraft outside the Solar System (at 150 AU and more) in a reasonable amount of time, in order to directly probe our (gravitational) Solar System neighborhood and answer pressing questions regarding the dark sector (dark energy and dark matter). We identify two closely related main science goals, as well as secondary objectives that could be fulfilled by a mission dedicated to probing the local dark sector: (i) begin the exploration of gravitations low-acceleration regime with a man-made spacecraft and (ii) improve our knowledge of the local dark matter and baryon densities. Those questions can be answered by directly measuring the gravitational potential with an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft on an outbound Solar System orbit, and by comparing the spacecrafts trajectory with that predicted by General Relativity through the combination of ranging data and the in-situ measurement (and correction) of non-gravitational accelerations with an on-board accelerometer. Despite a wealth of new experiments getting online in the near future, that will bring new knowledge about the dark sector, it is very unlikely that those science questions will be closed in the next two decades. More importantly, it is likely that it will be even more urgent than currently to answer them. Tracking a spacecraft carrying a clock and an accelerometer as it leaves the Solar System may well be the easiest and fastest way to directly probe our dark environment.
A phenomenological attempt at alleviating the so-called coincidence problem is to allow the dark matter and dark energy to interact. By assuming a coupled quintessence scenario characterized by an interaction parameter $epsilon$, we investigate the precision in the measurements of the expansion rate $H(z)$ required by future experiments in order to detect a possible deviation from the standard $Lambda$CDM model ($epsilon = 0$). We perform our analyses at two levels, namely: through Monte Carlo simulations based on $epsilon$CDM models, in which $H(z)$ samples with different accuracies are generated and through an analytic method that calculates the error propagation of $epsilon$ as a function of the error in $H(z)$. We show that our analytical approach traces simulations accurately and find that to detect an interaction {using $H(z)$ data only, these must reach an accuracy better than 1%.
We place observational constraints on two models within a class of scenarios featuring an elastic interaction between dark energy and dark matter that only produces momentum exchange up to first order in cosmological perturbations. The first one corresponds to a perfect-fluid model of the dark components with an explicit interacting Lagrangian, where dark energy acts as a dark radiation at early times and behaves as a cosmological constant at late times. The second one is a dynamical dark energy model with a dark radiation component, where the momentum exchange covariantly modifies the conservation equations in the dark sector. Using Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO), and Supernovae type Ia (SnIa) data, we show that the Hubble tension can be alleviated due to the additional radiation, while the $sigma_8$ tension present in the $Lambda$-Cold-Dark-Matter model can be eased by the weaker galaxy clustering that occurs in these interacting models. Furthermore, we show that, while CMB+BAO+SnIa data put only upper bounds on the coupling strength, adding low-redshift data in the form of a constraint on the parameter $S_8$ strongly favours nonvanishing values of the interaction parameters. Our findings are in line with other results in the literature that could signal a universal trend of the momentum exchange among the dark sector.
The surface density and vertical distribution of stars, stellar remnants, and gas in the solar vicinity form important ingredients for understanding the star formation history of the Galaxy as well as for inferring the local density of dark matter by using stellar kinematics to probe the gravitational potential. In this paper we review the literature for these baryonic components, reanalyze data, and provide tables of the surface densities and exponential scale heights of main sequence stars, giants, brown dwarfs, and stellar remnants. We also review three components of gas (H2, HI, and HII), give their surface densities at the solar circle, and discuss their vertical distribution. We find a local total surface density of M dwarfs of 17.3 pm 2.3 Mo/pc^2. Our result for the total local surface density of visible stars, 27.0 pm 2.7 Mo/pc^2, is close to previous estimates due to a cancellation of opposing effects: more mass in M dwarfs, less mass in the others. The total local surface density in white dwarfs is 4.9 pm 0.6 Mo/pc^2; in brown dwarfs, it is ~1.2 Mo/pc^2. We find that the total local surface density of stars and stellar remnants is 33.4 pm 3 Mo/pc^2, somewhat less than previous estimates. We analyze data on 21 cm emission and absorption and obtain good agreement with recent results on the local amount of neutral atomic hydrogen obtained with the Planck satellite. The local surface density of gas is 13.7 pm 1.6 Mo/pc^2. The total baryonic mass surface density that we derive for the solar neighborhood is 47.1 pm 3.4 Mo/pc^2. Combining these results with others measurements of the total surface density of matter within 1-1.1 kpc of the plane, we find that the local density of dark matter is 0.013 pm 0.003Mo/pc^3.The local density of all matter is 0.097 pm 0.013 Mo/pc^3. We discuss limitations on the properties of a possible thin disk of dark matter.
We study the effect of an explicit interaction between two scalar fields components describing dark matter in the context of a recent proposal framework for interaction. We find that, even assuming a very small coupling, it is sufficient to explain the observational effects of a cosmological constant, and also overcome the problems of the $Lambda$CDM model without assuming an exotic dark energy.
We consider the models of vacuum energy interacting with cold dark matter in this study, in which the coupling can change sigh during the cosmological evolution. We parameterize the running coupling $b$ by the form $b(a)=b_0a+b_e(1-a)$, where at the early-time the coupling is given by a constant $b_{e}$ and today the coupling is described by another constant $b_{0}$. We explore six specific models with (i) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_0$, (ii) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_{rm de}$, (iii) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_{rm c}$, (iv) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_0$, (v) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_{rm de}$, and (vi) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_{rm c}$. The current observational data sets we use to constrain the models include the JLA compilation of type Ia supernova data, the Planck 2015 distance priors data of cosmic microwave background observation, the baryon acoustic oscillations measurements, and the Hubble constant direct measurement. We find that, for all the models, we have $b_0<0$ and $b_e>0$ at around the 1$sigma$ level, and $b_0$ and $b_e$ are in extremely strong anti-correlation. Our results show that the coupling changes sign during the evolution at about the 1$sigma$ level, i.e., the energy transfer is from dark matter to dark energy when dark matter dominates the universe and the energy transfer is from dark energy to dark matter when dark energy dominates the universe.