arXiv subjects

Marian Douspis

Publications and source records attributed to Marian Douspis.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Inferring Cosmology and Astrophysics from the High-redshift 21cm Signal with SKA-Low

The Square Kilometre Array's low frequency telescope (SKA-Low) will enable inference of astrophysical and cosmological parameters from the redshifted 21 cm signal, probing the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionisation. While the power spectrum is the primary target for initial detection, the inherently non-Gaussian nature of the 21 cm signal, driven by the patchy evolution of ionised regions and spin temperature fluctuations, encodes rich information accessible through higher-order statistics and morphological measurements. Extracting these constraints requires diverse inference tools, encompassing both sophisticated modelling frameworks (analytical, semi-numerical, numerical, and emulators) used to predict the 21 cm signal, and advanced inference techniques (Bayesian, simulation-based, field-level) to connect statistics to the underlying physics. This chapter reviews these tools and explores the constraining power of different statistical probes accessible with SKA-Low, including the power spectrum, statistics beyond order two, moments of the signal distribution, and morphological measures. Combining these complementary statistics is crucial for breaking parameter degeneracies and unveiling the properties of the early Universe. We specifically assess the potential of the initial SKA-Low configuration (AA*) to measure galaxy and IGM properties, demonstrating its capability for early science results. This chapter forms part of a comprehensive set detailing the Epoch of Reionisation and Cosmic Dawn science case for the SKA-Low telescope.

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arXiv2026

Model independent test of the FLRW metric and the curvature in light of DESI DR2

We perform a data-driven test of the FLRW metric and the flatness of the Universe, independently of any Dark Energy model, and in light of the latest DESI DR2 results. We use Pantheon+ and DESY5 SNIa data to reconstruct the distance modulus, dimensionless comoving distance and Hubble parameter, using an iterative smoothing algorithm. Then, combining the various reconstructions with the recent BAO measurements from DESI DR2, we perform the $\mathcal{O}_k$ diagnostic, a litmus test of the FLRW metric and the flatness of the Universe. We obtain robust results that do not depend on Dark Energy models and test some of the underlying hypotheses of the concordance model. We find that when the reconstructed $\mathcal{O}_k$ diagnostic is consistent with the FLRW metric, then the median value of $Ω_{k,0}$ over all reconstructions that provide an improved fit relative to the flat $Λ$CDM model are: $Ω_{k,0}^\text{med} = 0.035 ^{+0.046}_{-0.079}\pm 0.037$ for the Pantheon+ \& DESI DR2 data combination, $Ω_{k,0}^\text{med} = 0.092 ^{+0.055}_{-0.132} \pm 0.064$ for the same data but with the Pantheon+ SNIa cut at redshift $z=1.13$, which is the maximum redshift of the DES~Y5 data, and $Ω_{k,0}^\text{med} = -0.119^{+0.113}_{-0.047}\pm 0.043$ for DES~Y5 \& DESI DR2. The first uncertainties correspond to the spread in $Ω_{k,0}$ over all reconstructions, followed by the median 1$σ$ error.

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arXiv2026

Non-parametric estimation of the baryon gas fraction and the cosmological bias with clusters

X-ray observations of galaxy clusters allow us to estimate the gas fraction, and thus the baryon fraction, and its evolution over time. This offers an additional cosmological probe as well as a probe of the gas behaviour in massive halos at the end of structure formation. However, cosmological and astrophysical effects are degenerate, and both should be modeled in order to explain observations; otherwise, the chosen baryonic model can potentially bias the cosmological results. We propose to quantify this effect by adopting a model-independent framework. We utilize Type Ia Supernovae to reconstruct the cosmic expansion history and apply the iterative smoothing method to infer the mass and redshift evolution of the hydrostatic mass bias. Our results confirm previous findings and show that the bias should evolve with time to reproduce CMB cosmological constraints.

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arXiv2025

Astrophysical constraints from future measurements of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich power spectrum

High-precision measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) will soon allow for the unprecedented detection of small-scale secondary anisotropies, such as the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. Linking the kSZ power spectrum to the properties of ionising sources would provide an opportunity to use such observations to access astrophysical and cosmological information from the Epoch of Reionisation, including the morphology of ionised regions, while simultaneously improving CMB analyses. The aim of this work is to assess this potential of the kSZ power spectrum to measure reionisation-era galaxy properties. We repurpose the publicly available LoReLi II simulations, which track the evolution of neutral hydrogen during reionisation, to generate a training set of patchy kSZ angular power spectra. We then train an emulator using neural network regression in order to allow for efficient Bayesian inference, and conduct forecasts assuming mock observations from current and future CMB experiments. We find that measurements of the kSZ power spectrum from such surveys can provide meaningful constraints on several of the astrophysical model parameters of the LoReLi II suite, including the ionising escape fraction for which we expect a 14% relative error, on average. They also provide an independent measurement of the CMB optical depth, marginalised over the astrophysics and with error bars competitive with the cosmic variance limit from large scale surveys. The kSZ power spectrum offers a promising avenue for probing the properties of reionisation-era galaxies and providing an independent measurement of the CMB optical depth with upcoming CMB experiments. Since the error budget of our mock observations is dominated by emulator reconstruction errors, we expect our results could be further improved with a more extended simulation training set.

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arXiv2024

Revisiting the large-scale CMB anomalies: The impact of the SZ signal from the Local Universe

The full sky measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies by $\textit{WMAP}$ and $\textit{Planck}$ have highlighted the presence of several unexpected isotropy-breaking features on the largest angular scales. In this work, we investigate the impact of the local large-scale structure on these anomalies through the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects. We use a constrained hydrodynamical simulation that reproduces the local Universe in a box of $500\,h^{-1}\,$Mpc to construct full sky maps of the temperature anisotropies produced by these two CMB secondary effects and discuss their statistical properties on large angular scales. We show the significant role played by the Virgo cluster on these scales, and compare it to theoretical predictions and random patches of the universe obtained from the hydrodynamical simulation $\textit{Magneticum}$. We explore three of the main CMB large-scale anomalies -- i.e., lack of correlation, quadrupole-octopole alignment and hemispherical asymmetry -- , both in the latest $\textit{Planck}$ data (PR4), where they are detected at a similar level to the previous releases, and using the simulated secondaries from the local Universe, verifying their negligible impact.

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arXiv2024

Tracing gaseous filaments connected to galaxy clusters: the case study of Abell 2744

Filaments connected to galaxy clusters are crucial environments to study the building up of cosmic structures as they funnel matter towards the clusters' deep gravitational potentials. Identifying gas in filaments is a challenge, due to their lower density contrast which produces faint signals. The best chance to detect these signals is therefore in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. We revisit the X-ray observation of the cluster Abell 2744 using statistical estimators of anisotropic matter distribution to identify filamentary patterns around it. We report for the first time the blind detection of filaments connected to a galaxy cluster from X-ray emission using a filament-finder technique and a multipole decomposition technique. We compare this result with filaments extracted from the distribution of spectroscopic galaxies, through which we demonstrate the robustness and reliability of our techniques in tracing a filamentary structure of 3 to 5 filaments connected to Abell 2744.

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arXiv2023

Characterising galaxy clusters' completeness function in Planck with hydrodynamical simulations

Galaxy cluster number counts are an important probe to constrain cosmological parameters. One of the main ingredients of the analysis, along with accurate estimates of the clusters' masses, is the selection function, and in particular the completeness, associated to the cluster sample one is considering. Incorrectly characterising this function can lead to biases in the cosmological constraints. In this work, we want to study the completeness of the Planck cluster catalog, estimating the clusters' probability of detection in a realistic setting using hydrodynamical simulations. In particular, we probe the case in which the cluster model assumed in the detection method differs from the shape and profiles of true galaxy clusters. We create around 9000 images of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from galaxy clusters from the IllustrisTNG simulation, and use a Monte-Carlo injection method to estimate the completeness function. We study the impact of having different cluster pressure profiles, as well as that of complex cluster morphologies on the detection process. We find that the cluster profile has a significant effect on the completeness, with clusters with steeper profiles producing a higher completeness than ones with flatter profiles. We also show that cluster morphologies have small impact on the completeness, finding that elliptical clusters have slightly lower probability of detection with respect to spherically symmetric ones. Finally, we investigate the impact of a different completeness function on a cosmological analysis with cluster number counts, showing a shift in the constraints on $Ω_m$ and $σ_8$ that lies in the same direction as the one driven by the mass bias.

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arXiv2023

Testing decaying dark matter models as a solution to the $S_8$ tension with the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

Considering possible solutions to the $S_8$ tension between the Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurement and low-redshift probes, we extended the standard $Λ$CDM cosmological model by including decay of dark matter (DDM). We first tested the DDM model in which dark matter decays into a form of noninteracting dark radiation. Under this DDM model, we investigated the impacts of DDM on the Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) effect by varying the decay lifetime, $Γ^{-1}$, including the background evolution in cosmology and the nonlinear prescription in the halo mass function. We performed a cosmological analysis under the assumption of this extended cosmological model by combining the latest high-redshift Planck CMB measurement and low-redshift measurements of the SZ power spectrum as well as the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and luminosity distances to type Ia supernovae (SNIa). Our result shows a preference for $Γ^{-1} \sim 220$ Gyr with a lower bound on the decay lifetime of $\sim$ 38 Gyr at 95\% confidence level. Additionally, we tested the other DDM model in which dark matter decays into warm dark matter and dark radiation. This model supports $Γ^{-1} \sim 137$ Gyr to resolve the $S_8$ tension with a lower bound on the decay lifetime of $\sim$ 24 Gyr at 95\% confidence level. Comparing these two models, we find that the second leads to slightly better reconciliation of the $S_8$ tension.

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arXiv2022

X-ray emission from cosmic web filaments in SRG/eROSITA data

Using the publicly available eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS) data, we detected the stacked X-ray emissions at the position of 463 filaments at a significance of 3.8 sigma based on the combination of all energy bands. In parallel, we found that the probability of the measurement under the null hypothesis is ~0.0017. The filaments were identified with galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey survey, ranging from 30 Mpc to 100 Mpc in length at 0.2 < z < 0.6. The stacking of the filaments was performed with the eFEDS X-ray count-rate maps in the energy range between 0.4 - 2.3 keV after masking the resolved galaxy groups and clusters and the identified X-ray point sources from the ROSAT, Chandra, XMM-Newton, and eROSITA observations. In addition, diffuse X-ray foreground and background emissions or any residual contribution were removed by subtracting the signal in the region between 10 - 20 Mpc from the filament spines. For the stacked signal, we performed an X-ray spectral analysis, which indicated that the signal is associated with a thermal emission. According to a model with the astrophysical plasma emission code for the plasma emission and with a beta-model gas distribution with beta=2/3, the detected X-ray signal can be interpreted as emission from hot gas in the filaments with an average gas temperature of 1.0 (+0.3 -0.2) keV and a gas overdensity of 21 +- 5 at the center of the filaments.

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arXiv2022

Quasi-spherical superclusters

Generally the dynamical state of superclusters is poorly known. We study properties of superclusters and select a sample of quasi-spherical superclusters, the dynamics of which can be studied using the $Λ$ significance diagram. We extracted our supercluster sample with an adaptive local threshold density method from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7) data and estimated their masses using the dynamical masses for member galaxies and groups. We used topological analysis based on Minkowski functionals and the positions of galaxies and galaxy groups in superclusters. Finally, we highlight the dynamical state of a few exceptional types of superclusters found in this study using the $Λ$ significance diagram. Our final sample contains 65 superclusters in the distance range of 130 to 450 Mpc. Supercluster masses range between $1.1 \times 10^{15} M_{\sun}$ and $1.4 \times 10^{16} M_{\sun}$ and sizes between 25 Mpc and 87 Mpc. We find that pancake-type superclusters form the low-luminosity, small, poor and low-mass end of superclusters. We find four superclusters of unusual types, exhibiting exceptionally spherical shapes. These so-called quasi-spherical systems contain a high-density core surrounded by a relatively spherical density and galaxy distribution.The mass-to-light ratio of these quasi-sphericals is higher than those of the other superclusters, suggesting a relatively high dark matter content. Using the $Λ$ significance diagram for oblate and prolate spheroids, we find that three quasi-spherical superclusters are gravitationally bound at the present epoch. Quasi-spherical superclusters are among the largest gravitationally bound systems found to date, and form a special class of giant systems that, dynamically, are in between large gravitationally unbound superclusters and clusters of galaxies in an equilibrium configuration.

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arXiv2022

Retrieving cosmological information from small-scale CMB foregrounds II. The kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect

Recent results of ground-based telescopes, giving high-quality measurements of the CMB temperature power spectrum on small scales motivate the need for an accurate model of foregrounds, which dominate the primary signal at these multipoles. In a previous work, we have shown that cosmological information could be retrieved from the power spectrum of the thermal SZ effect. In this work, we introduce a physically motivated model of the Epoch of Reionisation in the cosmological analysis of CMB data, which is coherent on all scales. In particular, at high multipoles, the power spectrum of the kinetic SZ (kSZ) effect is inferred from a set of cosmological and reionisation parameters by a machine-learning algorithm. First including an asymmetric parameterisation of the reionisation history in the Planck 2018 data analysis, we retrieve a value of the optical depth consistent with previous results, but stemming from a completely different history of reionisation in which the first luminous sources light up as early as $z=15$. Considering the latest small-scale data from the SPT and letting the cosmology free to vary, we find that including the new cosmology-dependent SZ spectra helps tighten the constraints on their amplitudes by breaking their degeneracy. We report a $5σ$ measurement of the kSZ signal at $\ell=3000$, $\mathcal{D}_{3000}^\mathrm{kSZ} = 3.4^{+0.5}_{-0.3}\,μ\mathrm{K}^2$ at the 68% confidence level, marginalised over cosmology, as well as an upper limit on the patchy signal from reionisation $\mathcal{D}_{3000}^\mathrm{pkSZ}<1.6~μ\mathrm{K}^2$ (95% C.L.). Additionally, we find that the SPT data favour slightly earlier reionisation scenarios than Planck, leading to $τ= 0.062 ^{+0.012}_{-0.015}$ and a reionisation midpoint $z_\mathrm{re} = 7.9^{+1.1}_{-1.3}$ (68% C.L.), which is in line with constraints from high-redshift quasars and galaxies.

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arXiv2022

Retrieving cosmological information from small-scale CMB foregrounds I. The thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect

We propose a new analysis of small scale CMB data by introducing the cosmological dependency of the foreground signals, focusing first on the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) power spectrum, derived from the halo model. We analyse the latest observations by the South Pole Telescope (SPT) of the high-$\ell$ power (cross) spectra at 90, 150 and 220 GHz, as the sum of CMB and tSZ signals, both depending on cosmological parameters, and remaining contaminants. In order to perform faster analyses, we propose a new tSZ modelling based on machine learning algorithms (namely Random Forest). We show that the additional information contained in the tSZ power spectrum tightens constraints on cosmological and tSZ scaling relation parameters. We combine for the first time the Planck tSZ data with SPT high-$\ell$ to derive even stronger constraints. Finally, we show how the amplitude of the remaining kSZ power spectrum varies depending on the assumptions made on both tSZ and cosmological parameters.

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arXiv2021

CMB at small scales: Cosmology from tSZ power spectrum

Small scale CMB angular power spectrum contains not only primordial CMB information but also many contaminants coming from secondary anisotropies. Most of the latter depend on the cosmological model but are often marginalised over. We propose a new analysis of the SPT data focusing on the cosmological contribution of the thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect. We model the tSZ angular spectrum with the halo model and train a random forest algorithm to speed up its computation. We show that using the cosmological information of the tSZ on top of the primordial CMB one contained in SPT data bring more constraints on cosmological parameters. We also combine for the first time Planck tSZ angular power spectrum with SPT ones to put further constraints. This proof of concept study shows how much a proper modelling of the foregrounds in the cosmological analyses is needed.

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arXiv2021

Constraining hydrostatic mass bias and cosmological parameters with the gas mass fraction in galaxy clusters

The gas mass fraction in galaxy clusters is a convenient tool to use in the context of cosmological studies. Indeed this quantity allows to constrain the universal baryon fraction $Ω_b/Ω_m$, as well as other parameters like the matter density $Ω_m$, the Hubble parameter $h$ or the Equation of State of Dark Energy $w$. This gas mass fraction is also sensitive to baryonic effects that need to be taken into account, and that translate into nuisance parameters. Two of them are the depletion factor $Υ$, and the hydrostatic mass bias $B = (1 - b)$. The first one describes how baryons are depleted in clusters with respect to the universal baryon fraction, while the other encodes the bias coming from the fact that the mass is deduced from X-ray observations under the hypothesis of hydrostatic equilibrium. We will show preliminary results, obtained using the {\it Planck}-ESZ clusters observed by XMM-{\it Newton}, on both cosmological and cluster parameters. We will notably discuss the investigation on a possible redshift dependence of the mass bias, which is considered to be non-existent in hydrodynamic simulations based on $Λ$-CDM, and compare our results with other studies.

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arXiv2021

Constraining cosmology with a new all-sky Compton parameter map from the Planck PR4 data

We constructed a new all-sky Compton parameter map (y-map) of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect from the 100 to 857 GHz frequency channel maps delivered within the Planck data release 4. The improvements in terms of noise and systematic effects translated into a y-map with a noise level smaller by ~7% compared to the maps released in 2015, and with significantly reduced survey stripes. The produced 2020 y-map is also characterized by residual foreground contamination, mainly due to thermal dust emission at large angular scales and to CIB and extragalactic point sources at small angular scales. Using the new Planck data, we computed the tSZ angular power spectrum and found that the tSZ signal dominates the y-map in the multipole range, 60 < l < 600. We performed the cosmological analysis with the tSZ angular power spectrum and found S8=0.764+0.015-0.018(stat)+0.031-0.016(sys), including systematic uncertainties from a hydrostatic mass bias and pressure profile model. The S8 value may differ by +-0.016 depending on the hydrostatic mass bias model and by +0.021 depending on the pressure profile model used for the analysis. The obtained value is fully consistent with recent KiDS and DES weak-lensing observations. While our result is slightly lower than the Planck CMB one, it is consistent with the latter within 2 sigma.

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arXiv2021

X-ray analysis of the Planck-detected triplet-cluster system PLCK G334.8-38

We conducted an X-ray analysis of one of the two Planck-detected triplet-cluster systems, PLCK G334.8-38.0, with a $\sim100$~ks deep XMM-Newton data. We find that the system has a redshift of $z=0.37\pm{0.01}$ but the precision of the X-ray spectroscopy for two members is too low to rule out a projected triplet system, demanding optical spectroscopy for further investigation. In projection, the system looks almost like an equilateral triangle with an edge length of $\sim2.0\,\mathrm{Mpc}$, but masses are very unevenly distributed ($M_{500} \sim [2.5,0.7,0.3] \times 10^{14}\,\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ from bright to faint). The brightest member appears to be a relaxed cool-core cluster and is more than twice as massive as both other members combined. The second brightest member appears to be a disturbed non-cool-core cluster and the third member was too faint to make any classification. None of the clusters have an overlapping $R_{500}$ region and no signs of cluster interaction were found; however, the XMM-Newton data alone are probably not sensitive enough to detect such signs, and a joint analysis of X-ray and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (tSZ) is needed for further investigation, which may also reveal the presence of the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) within the system. The comparison with the other Planck-detected triplet-cluster-system (PLCK G214.6+36.9) shows that they have rather different configurations, suggesting rather different merger scenarios, under the assumption that they are both not simply projected triplet systems.

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arXiv2021

High resolution tomography for galaxy spectroscopic surveys with angular redshift fluctuations

In the context of next-generation spectroscopic galaxy surveys, new statistics of the distribution of matter are currently being developed. Among these, we investigated the angular redshift fluctuations (ARF), which probe the information contained in the projected redshift distribution of galaxies. Relying on the Fisher formalism, we show how ARF will provide complementary cosmological information compared to traditional angular galaxy clustering. We tested both the standard $\mathrm{ΛCDM}$ model and the $\mathrm{wCDM}$ extension. We find that the cosmological and galaxy bias parameters express different degeneracies when inferred from ARF or from angular galaxy clustering. As such, combining both observables breaks these degeneracies and greatly decreases the marginalised uncertainties by a factor of at least two on most parameters for the $\mathrm{ΛCDM}$ and $\mathrm{wCDM}$ models. We find that the ARF combined with angular galaxy clustering provide a great way to probe dark energy by increasing the figure of merit of the $w_0$-$w_{\rm a}$ parameter set by a factor of more than ten compared to angular galaxy clustering alone. Finally, we compared ARF to the CMB lensing constraints on the galaxy bias parameters. We show that a joint analysis of ARF and angular galaxy clustering improves constraints by $\sim 40\%$ on galaxy bias compared to a joint analysis of angular galaxy clustering and CMB lensing.

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arXiv2020

Characterising filaments in the SDSS volume from the galaxy distribution

Detecting the large-scale structure of the Universe based on the galaxy distribution and characterising its components is of fundamental importance in astrophysics but is also a difficult task to achieve. Wide-area spectroscopic redshift surveys are required to accurately measure galaxy positions in space that also need to cover large areas of the sky. It is also difficult to create algorithms that can extract cosmic web structures (e.g. filaments). Moreover, these detections will be affected by systematic uncertainties that stem from the characteristics of the survey used (e.g. its completeness and coverage) and from the unique properties of the specific method adopted to detect the cosmic web (i.e. the assumptions it relies on and the free parameters it may employ). For these reasons, the creation of new catalogues of cosmic web features on wide sky areas is important, as this allows users to have at their disposal a well-understood sample of structures whose systematic uncertainties have been thoroughly investigated. In this paper we present the filament catalogues created using the discrete persistent structure extractor (DisPerSE) tool in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and we fully characterise them in terms of their dependence on the choice of parameters pertaining to the algorithm, and with respect to several systematic issues that may arise in the skeleton as a result of the properties of the galaxy distribution (such as Finger-of-God redshift distortions and defects of the density field that are due to the boundaries of the survey).

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