No Arabic abstract
Measurement of peculiar velocities by combining redshifts and distance indicators is a powerful way to measure the growth rate of cosmic structure and test theories of gravity at low redshift. Here we constrain the growth rate of structure by comparing observed Fundamental Plane peculiar velocities for 15894 galaxies from the 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with predicted velocities and densities from the 2M$++$ redshift survey. We measure the velocity scale parameter $beta equiv {Omega_m^gamma}/b = 0.372^{+0.034}_{-0.050}$ and $0.314^{+0.031}_{-0.047}$ for 6dFGS and SDSS respectively, where $Omega_m$ is the mass density parameter, $gamma$ is the growth index, and $b$ is the bias parameter normalized to the characteristic luminosity of galaxies, $L^*$. Combining 6dFGS and SDSS we obtain $beta= 0.341pm0.024$, implying that the amplitude of the product of the growth rate and the mass fluctuation amplitude is $fsigma_8 = 0.338pm0.027$ at an effective redshift $z=0.035$. Adopting $Omega_m = 0.315pm0.007$ as favoured by Planck and using $gamma=6/11$ for General Relativity and $gamma=11/16$ for DGP gravity, we get $S_8(z=0) = sigma_8 sqrt{Omega_m/0.3} =0.637 pm 0.054$ and $0.741pm0.062$ for GR and DGP respectively. This measurement agrees with other low-redshift probes of large scale structure but deviates by more than $3sigma$ from the latest Planck CMB measurement. Our results favour values of the growth index $gamma > 6/11$ or a Hubble constant $H_0 > 70$,km,s$^{-1}$,Mpc$^{-1}$ or a fluctuation amplitude $sigma_8 < 0.8$ or some combination of these. Imminent redshift surveys such as Taipan, DESI, WALLABY, and SKA1-MID will help to resolve this tension by measuring the growth rate of cosmic structure to 1% in the redshift range $0 < z < 1$.
Peculiar velocities are an important probe of the growth rate of mass density fluctuations in the Universe. Most previous studies have focussed exclusively on measuring peculiar velocities at intermediate ($0.2 < z < 1$) redshifts using statistical redshift-space distortions. Here we emphasize the power of peculiar velocities obtained directly from distance measurements at low redshift ($z lesssim 0.05$), and show that these data break the usual degeneracies in the Omega_{m,0} -- $sigma_{8,0}$ parameter space. Using only peculiar velocity data, we find $Omega_{m,0} = 0.259pm0.045$ and $sigma_{8,0} = 0.748pm0.035$. Fixing the amplitude of fluctuations at very high redshift using observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the same data can be used to constrain the growth index $gamma$, with the strongest constraints coming from peculiar velocity measurements in the nearby Universe. We find $gamma = 0.619pm 0.054$, consistent with LCDM. Current peculiar velocity data already strongly constrain modified gravity models, and will be a powerful test as data accumulate.
How do peculiar velocities affect observed voids? To answer this question we use the VIDE toolkit to identify voids in mock galaxy populations embedded within an N-body simulation both with and without peculiar velocities included. We compare the resulting void populations to assess the impact on void properties. We find that void abundances and spherically-averaged radial density profiles are mildly affected by peculiar velocities. However, peculiar velocities can distort by up to 10% the shapes for a particular subset of voids depending on the void size and density contrast, which can lead to increased variance in Alcock-Paczynski test. We offer guidelines for performing optimal cuts on the void catalogue to reduce this variance by removing the most severely affected voids while preserving the unaffected ones. In addition, since this shape distortion is largely limited to the line of sight, we show that the void radii are only affected at the $sim$ 10% level and the macrocenter positions at the $sim$ 20% (even before performing cuts), meaning that cosmological probes based on the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe and gravitational lensing are not severely impacted by peculiar velocities.
A key obstacle to developing a satisfying theory of galaxy evolution is the difficulty in extending analytic descriptions of early structure formation into full nonlinearity, the regime in which galaxy growth occurs. Extant techniques, though powerful, are based on approximate numerical methods whose Monte Carlo-like nature hinders intuition building. Here, we develop a new solution to this problem and its empirical validation. We first derive closed-form analytic expectations for the evolution of fixed percentiles in the real-space cosmic density distribution, {it averaged over representative volumes observers can track cross-sectionally}. Using the Lagrangian forms of the fluid equations, we show that percentiles in $delta$---the density relative to the median---should grow as $delta(t)proptodelta_{0}^{alpha},t^{beta}$, where $alphaequiv2$ and $betaequiv2$ for Newtonian gravity at epochs after the overdensities transitioned to nonlinear growth. We then use 9.5 sq. deg. of Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey data to map {it galaxy} environmental densities over $0.2<z<1.5$ ($sim$7 Gyr) and infer $alpha=1.98pm0.04$ and $beta=2.01pm0.11$---consistent with our analytic prediction. These findings---enabled by swapping the Eulerian domain of most work on density growth for a Lagrangian approach to real-space volumetric averages---provide some of the strongest evidence that a lognormal distribution of early density fluctuations indeed decoupled from cosmic expansion to grow through gravitational accretion. They also comprise the first exact, analytic description of the nonlinear growth of structure extensible to (arbitrarily) low redshift. We hope these results open the door to new modeling of, and insight-building into, the galaxy growth and its diversity in cosmological contexts.
We present a void clustering analysis in configuration-space using the completed Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV (SDSS-IV) extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) DR16 samples. These samples consist of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) combined with the high redshift tail of the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) DR12 CMASS galaxies (called as LRG+CMASS sample), Emission Line Galaxies (ELG) and quasars (QSO). We build void catalogues from the three eBOSS DR16 samples using a ZOBOV-based algorithm, providing 2,814 voids, 1,801 voids and 4,347 voids in the LRG+CMASS, ELG and QSO samples, respectively, spanning the redshift range $0.6<z<2.2$. We measure the redshift space distortions (RSD) around voids using the anisotropic void-galaxy cross-correlation function and we extract the distortion parameter $beta$. We test the methodology on realistic simulations before applying it to the data, and we investigate all our systematic errors on these mocks. We find $beta^{rm LRG}(z=0.74)=0.415pm0.087$, $beta^{rm ELG}(z=0.85)=0.665pm0.125$ and $beta^{rm QSO}(z=1.48)=0.313pm0.134$, for the LRG+CMASS, ELG and QSO sample, respectively. The quoted errors include systematic and statistical contributions. In order to convert our measurements in terms of the growth rate $fsigma_8$, we use consensus values of linear bias from the eBOSS DR16 companion papers~citep{eBOSScosmo}, resulting in the following constraints: $fsigma_8(z=0.74)=0.50pm0.11$, $fsigma_8(z=0.85)=0.52pm0.10$ and $fsigma_8(z=1.48)=0.30pm0.13$. Our measurements are consistent with other measurements from eBOSS DR16 using conventional clustering techniques.
When measuring the value of the Hubble parameter, $H_0$, it is necessary to know the recession velocity free of the effects of peculiar velocities. In this work, we study different models of peculiar velocity in the local Universe. In particular, we compare models based on density reconstruction from galaxy redshift surveys and kernel smoothing of peculiar velocity data. The velocity field from the density reconstruction is obtained using the 2M++ galaxy redshift compilation, which is compared to two adaptive kernel-smoothed velocity fields: the first obtained from the 6dF Fundamental Plane sample and the other using a Tully-Fisher catalogue obtained by combining SFI++ and 2MTF. We highlight that smoothed velocity fields should be rescaled to obtain unbiased velocity estimates. Comparing the predictions of these models to the observations from a few test sets of peculiar velocity data, obtained from the Second Amendment Supernovae catalogue and the Tully-Fisher catalogues, we find that 2M++ reconstruction provides a better model of the peculiar velocity in the local Universe than the kernel-smoothed peculiar velocity models. We study the impact of peculiar velocities on the measurement of $H_0$ from gravitational waves and megamasers. In doing so, we introduce a probabilistic framework to marginalize over the peculiar velocity corrections along the line-of-sight. For the megamasers, we find $H_0 = 69^{+2.9}_{-2.8}$ km s^{-1} Mpc^{-1} using the 2M++ velocity field. We also study the peculiar velocity of the the galaxy NGC1052-DF2, concluding that a short $sim$ 13 Mpc distance is not a likely explanation of the anomalously low dark matter fraction of that galaxy.