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Villanueva-Domingo, P., & Villaescusa-Navarro, F. (2021). Removing Astrophysics in 21 cm Maps with Neural Networks. Astrophys. J., 907(1), 44–14pp.
Abstract: Measuring temperature fluctuations in the 21 cm signal from the epoch of reionization and the cosmic dawn is one of the most promising ways to study the universe at high redshifts. Unfortunately, the 21 cm signal is affected by both cosmology and astrophysics processes in a nontrivial manner. We run a suite of 1000 numerical simulations with different values of the main astrophysical parameters. From these simulations we produce tens of thousands of 21 cm maps at redshifts 10 <= z <= 20. We train a convolutional neural network to remove the effects of astrophysics from the 21 cm maps and output maps of the underlying matter field. We show that our model is able to generate 2D matter fields not only that resemble the true ones visually but whose statistical properties agree with the true ones within a few percent down to scales 2 Mpc(-1). We demonstrate that our neural network retains astrophysical information that can be used to constrain the value of the astrophysical parameters. Finally, we use saliency maps to try to understand which features of the 21 cm maps the network is using in order to determine the value of the astrophysical parameters.
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HAWC Collaboration(Albert, A. et al), & Salesa Greus, F. (2021). Probing the Sea of Cosmic Rays by Measuring Gamma-Ray Emission from Passive Giant Molecular Clouds with HAWC. Astrophys. J., 914(2), 106–14pp.
Abstract: The study of high-energy gamma rays from passive giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in our Galaxy is an indirect way to characterize and probe the paradigm of the “sea” of cosmic rays in distant parts of the Galaxy. By using data from the High Altitude Water Cerenkov (HAWC) Observatory, we measure the gamma-ray flux above 1 TeV of a set of these clouds to test the paradigm. We selected high galactic latitude clouds that are in HAWC's field of view and that are within 1 kpc distance from the Sun. We find no significant excess emission in the cloud regions, nor when we perform a stacked log-likelihood analysis of GMCs. Using a Bayesian approach, we calculate 95% credible interval upper limits of the gamma-ray flux and estimate limits on the cosmic-ray energy density of these regions. These are the first limits to constrain gamma-ray emission in the multi-TeV energy range (>1 TeV) using passive high galactic latitude GMCs. Assuming that the main gamma-ray production mechanism is due to proton-proton interaction, the upper limits are consistent with a cosmic-ray flux and energy density similar to that measured at Earth.
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HAWC Collaboration(Albert, A. et al), & Salesa Greus, F. (2022). Probing the Extragalactic Mid-infrared Background with HAWC. Astrophys. J., 933(2), 223–8pp.
Abstract: The extragalactic background light (EBL) contains all the radiation emitted by nuclear and accretion processes in stars and compact objects since the epoch of recombination. Measuring the EBL density directly is challenging, especially in the near-to-far-infrared wave band, mainly due to the zodiacal light foreground. Instead, gamma-ray astronomy offers the possibility to indirectly set limits on the EBL by studying the effects of gamma-ray absorption in the very high energy (VHE: >100 GeV) spectra of distant blazars. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma Ray Observatory (HAWC) is one of the few instruments sensitive to gamma rays with energies above 10 TeV. This offers the opportunity to probe the EBL in the near/mid-IR region: lambda = 1-100 μm. In this study, we fit physically motivated emission models to Fermi-LAT gigaelectronvolt data to extrapolate the intrinsic teraelectronvolt spectra of blazars. We then simulate a large number of absorbed spectra for different randomly generated EBL model shapes and calculate Bayesian credible bands in the EBL intensity space by comparing and testing the agreement between the absorbed spectra and HAWC extragalactic observations of two blazars. The resulting bands are in agreement with current EBL lower and upper limits, showing a downward trend toward higher wavelength values lambda > 10 μm also observed in previous measurements.
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de Putter, R., Mena, O., Giusarma, E., Ho, S., Cuesta, A., Seo, H. J., et al. (2012). New Neutrino Mass Bounds from SDSS-III Data Release 8 Photometric Luminous Galaxies. Astrophys. J., 761(1), 12–12pp.
Abstract: We present neutrino mass bounds using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts measured from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Data Release 8. The galaxies have photometric redshifts between z = 0.45 and z = 0.65 and cover 10,000 deg(2), thus probing a volume of 3 h(-3) Gpc(3) and enabling tight constraints to be derived on the amount of dark matter in the form of massive neutrinos. A new bound on the sum of neutrino masses Sigma m nu < 0.27 eV, at the 95% confidence level (CL), is obtained after combining our sample of galaxies, which we call “CMASS,” with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) seven-year cosmic microwave background data and the most recent measurement of the Hubble parameter from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This constraint is obtained with a conservative multipole range of 30 < l < 200 in order to minimize nonlinearities, and a free bias parameter in each of the four redshift bins. We study the impact of assuming this linear galaxy bias model using mock catalogs and find that this model causes a small (similar to 1 sigma-1.5 sigma) bias in Omega(DM)h(2). For this reason, we also quote neutrino bounds based on a conservative galaxy bias model containing additional, shot-noise-like free parameters. In this conservative case, the bounds are significantly weakened, e. g., Sigma m(nu) < 0.38 eV (95% CL) for WMAP+HST+CMASS (l(max) = 200). We also study the dependence of the neutrino bound on the multipole range (l(max) = 150 versus l(max) = 200) and on which combination of data sets is included as a prior. The addition of supernova and/or baryon acoustic oscillation data does not significantly improve the neutrino mass bound once the HST prior is included. A companion paper describes the construction of the angular power spectra in detail and derives constraints on a general cosmological model, including the dark energy equation of state w and the spatial curvature Omega(K), while a second companion paper presents a measurement of the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations from the same data set. All three works are based on the catalog by Ross et al.
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Reichardt, C. L., de Putter, R., Zahn, O., & Hou, Z. (2012). New limits on early dark energy from the South Pole telescope. Astrophys. J. Lett., 749(1), L9–5pp.
Abstract: We present new limits on early dark energy (EDE) from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite on large angular scales and South Pole Telescope on small angular scales. We find a strong upper limit on the EDE density of Omega(e) < 0.018 at 95% confidence, a factor of three improvement over WMAP data alone. We show that adding lower-redshift probes of the expansion rate to the CMB data improves constraints on the dark energy equation of state, but not the EDE density. We also explain how small-scale CMB temperature anisotropy constrains EDE.
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