Recent observations of the rotation curve of M31 show a rise of the outer part that can not be understood in terms of standard dark matter models or perturbations of the galactic disc by M31s satellites. Here, we propose an explanation of this dynami
cal feature based on the influence of the magnetic field within the thin disc. We have considered standard mass models for the luminous mass distribution, a NFW model to describe the dark halo, and we have added up the contribution to the rotation curve of a magnetic field in the disc, which is described by an axisymmetric pattern. Our conclusion is that a significant improvement of the fit in the outer part is obtained when magnetic effects are considered. The best-fit solution requires an amplitude of ~4 microG with a weak radial dependence between 10 and 38 kpc.
We present the current status of the QUIJOTE (Q-U-I JOint TEnerife) CMB Experiment, a new instrument which will start operations early 2009 at Teide Observatory, with the aim of characterizing the polarization of the CMB and other processes of galact
ic and extragalactic emission in the frequency range 10-30 GHz and at large angular scales. QUIJOTE will be a valuable complement at low frequencies for the PLANCK mission, and will have the required sensitivity to detect a primordial gravitational-wave component if the tensor-to-scalar ratio is larger than r=0.05.
[ABRIDGED] The unconditional mass function (UMF) of dark matter haloes has been determined accurately in the literature, showing excellent agreement with high resolution numerical simulations. However, this is not the case for the conditional mass fu
nction (CMF). We propose a simple analytical procedure to derive the CMF by rescaling the UMF to the constrained environment using the appropriate mean and variance of the density field at the constrained point. This method introduces two major modifications with respect to the standard re-scaling procedure. First of all, rather than using in the scaling procedure the properties of the environment averaged over all the conditioning region, we implement the re-scaling locally. We show that for high masses this modification may lead to substantially different results. Secondly, we modify the (local) standard re-scaling procedure in such a manner as to force normalisation, in the sense that when one integrates the CMF over all possible values of the constraint multiplied by their corresponding probability distribution, the UMF is recovered. In practise, we do this by replacing in the standard procedure the value delta_c (the linear density contrast for collapse) by certain adjustable effective parameter delta_eff. In order to test the method, we compare our prescription with the results obtained from numerical simulations in voids (Gottlober et al. 2003), finding a very good agreement. Based on these results, we finally present a very accurate analytical fit to the (accumulated) conditional mass function obtained with our procedure, which may be useful for any theoretical treatment of the large scale structure.
The main goal of this work is to calculate the contributions to the cosmological recombination spectrum due to bound-bound transitions of helium. We show that due to the presence of helium in the early Universe unique features appear in the total cos
mological recombination spectrum. These may provide a unique observational possibility to determine the relative abundance of primordial helium, well before the formation of first stars. We include the effect of the tiny fraction of neutral hydrogen atoms on the dynamics of HeII -> HeI recombination at redshifts $zsim 2500$. As discussed recently, this process significantly accelerates HeII -> HeI recombination, resulting in rather narrow and distinct features in the associated recombination spectrum. In addition this process induces some emission within the hydrogen Lyman-$alpha$ line, before the actual epoch of hydrogen recombination round $zsim 1100-1500$. We also show that some of the fine structure transitions of neutral helium appear in absorption, again leaving unique traces in the Cosmic Microwave Background blackbody spectrum, which may allow to confirm our understanding of the early Universe and detailed atomic physics.
