A filament of dark matter between two clusters of galaxies

It is a firm prediction of the concordance cold-dark-matter cosmological model that galaxy clusters occur at the intersection of large-scale structure filaments. The thread-like structure of this 'cosmic web' has been traced by galaxy redshift surveys for decades. More recently, the warm–hot intergalactic medium (a sparse plasma with temperatures of 10(5) kelvin to 10(7) kelvin) residing in low-redshift filaments has been observed in emission and absorption. However, a reliable direct detection of the underlying dark-matter skeleton, which should contain more than half of all matter, has remained elusive, because earlier candidates for such detections were either falsified or suffered from low signal-to-noise ratios and unphysical misalignments of dark and luminous matter. Here we report the detection of a dark-matter filament connecting the two main components of the Abell 222/223 supercluster system from its weak gravitational lensing signal, both in a non-parametric mass reconstruction and in parametric model fits. This filament is coincident with an overdensity of galaxies and diffuse, soft-X-ray emission, and contributes a mass comparable to that of an additional galaxy cluster to the total mass of the supercluster. By combining this result with X-ray observations, we can place an upper limit of 0.09 on the hot gas fraction (the mass of X-ray-emitting gas divided by the total mass) in the filament.     

Supermassive black holes do not correlate with dark matter haloes of galaxies

Supermassive black holes have been detected in all galaxies that contain bulge components when the galaxies observed were close enough that the searches were feasible. Together with the observation that bigger black holes live in bigger bulges, this has led to the belief that black-hole growth and bulge formation regulate each other. That is, black holes and bulges coevolve. Therefore, reports of a similar correlation between black holes and the dark matter haloes in which visible galaxies are embedded have profound implications. Dark matter is likely to be non-baryonic, so these reports suggest that unknown, exotic physics controls black-hole growth. Here we show, in part on the basis of recent measurements of bulgeless galaxies, that there is almost no correlation between dark matter and parameters that measure black holes unless the galaxy also contains a bulge. We conclude that black holes do not correlate directly with dark matter. They do not correlate with galaxy disks, either. Therefore, black holes coevolve only with bulges. This simplifies the puzzle of their coevolution by focusing attention on purely baryonic processes in the galaxy mergers that make bulges.     

Detection of weak gravitational lensing distortions of distant galaxies by cosmic dark matter at large scales

Most of the matter in the Universe is not luminous, and can be observed only through its gravitational influence on the appearance of luminous matter. Weak gravitational lensing is a technique that uses the distortions of the images of distant galaxies as a tracer of dark matter: such distortions are induced as the light passes through large-scale distributions of dark matter in the foreground. The patterns of the induced distortions reflect the density of mass along the line of sight and its distribution, and the resulting 'cosmic shear' can be used to distinguish between alternative cosmologies. But previous attempts to measure this effect have been inconclusive. Here we report the detection of cosmic shear on angular scales of up to half a degree using 145,000 galaxies and along three separate lines of sight. We find that the dark matter is distributed in a manner consistent with either an open universe, or a flat universe that is dominated by a cosmological constant. Our results are inconsistent with the standard cold-dark-matter model.     

A substantial population of low-mass stars in luminous elliptical galaxies

The stellar initial mass function (IMF) describes the mass distribution of stars at the time of their formation and is of fundamental importance for many areas of astrophysics. The IMF is reasonably well constrained in the disk of the Milky Way but we have very little direct information on the form of the IMF in other galaxies and at earlier cosmic epochs. Here we report observations of the Na?(I) doublet and the Wing-Ford molecular FeH band in the spectra of elliptical galaxies. These lines are strong in stars with masses less than 0.3M(⊙) (where M(⊙) is the mass of the Sun) and are weak or absent in all other types of stars. We unambiguously detect both signatures, consistent with previous studies that were based on data of lower signal-to-noise ratio. The direct detection of the light of low-mass stars implies that they are very abundant in elliptical galaxies, making up over 80% of the total number of stars and contributing more than 60% of the total stellar mass. We infer that the IMF in massive star-forming galaxies in the early Universe produced many more low-mass stars than the IMF in the Milky Way disk, and was probably slightly steeper than the Salpeter form in the mass range 0.1M(⊙) to 1M(⊙).     

暗物质模型简介

本文简单介绍了一些关于暗物质的模型研究,首先概述了暗物质的发现和大致的研究框架,并介绍了一些自然的暗物质候选者,如轴子和超对称模型中的Neutralino等,随后我们讨论一些具体模型和由实验诱导的一些模型.     

Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies

Observational work conducted over the past few decades indicates that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. Although the luminosities and brightness fluctuations of quasars in the early Universe suggest that some were powered by black holes with masses greater than 10 billion solar masses, the remnants of these objects have not been found in the nearby Universe. The giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts the hitherto most massive known black hole, which has a mass of 6.3 billion solar masses. Here we report that NGC 3842, the brightest galaxy in a cluster at a distance from Earth of 98 megaparsecs, has a central black hole with a mass of 9.7 billion solar masses, and that a black hole of comparable or greater mass is present in NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster (at a distance of 103 megaparsecs). These two black holes are significantly more massive than predicted by linearly extrapolating the widely used correlations between black-hole mass and the stellar velocity dispersion or bulge luminosity of the host galaxy. Although these correlations remain useful for predicting black-hole masses in less massive elliptical galaxies, our measurements suggest that different evolutionary processes influence the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes.     

暗物质间接探测现状

本文简介了暗物质间接探测的最新进展.主要介绍近年来PAMELA（Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics）卫星所探测到的宇宙线正电子超出的问题,及相关的理论解释.本文还介绍了PAMELA对于宇宙线反质子的测量结果,ATIC和Fermi卫星对于正负电子总能谱的测量结果等.另一个重要的结果来自于Fermi和地面实验对于伽马射线的测量结果,这些结果对暗物质性质给出较强的限制.     

暗能量与暗物质相互耦合的观测限制

暗能量是一种引起宇宙加速彭胀的排斥力,探索暗能量的性质是目前天文学和理论物理领域中最突出的问题之一。提供选取暗能量状态参数为常量和变量(随红移变化)的2种模型,并考虑在模型中加入一种被广泛采用的暗能量耦合形式Q=3αHρm进行数值模拟讨论。应用最新的观测数据对耦合模型的相关参数进行限制,得到了暗因子耦合强度的上限。对常量和变量耦合模型,在1σ,2σ和3σ置信度内,代表耦合强度的参数分别为α≤0.0176(0.0225)(0.0273)和α≤0.0206(0.0278)(0.0345)。研究表明,这2种模型可给出与目前的观测结果相一致的参数范围。     

The formation of cluster elliptical galaxies as revealed by extensive star formation

The most massive galaxies in the present-day Universe are found to lie in the centres of rich clusters. They have old, coeval stellar populations suggesting that the bulk of their stars must have formed at early epochs in spectacular starbursts, which should be luminous phenomena when observed at submillimetre wavelengths. The most popular model of galaxy formation predicts that these galaxies form in proto-clusters at high-density peaks in the early Universe. Such peaks are indicated by massive high-redshift radio galaxies. Here we report deep submillimetre mapping of seven high-redshift radio galaxies and their environments. These data confirm not only the presence of spatially extended regions of massive star-formation activity in the radio galaxies themselves, but also in companion objects previously undetected at any wavelength. The prevalence, orientation, and inferred masses of these submillimetre companion galaxies suggest that we are witnessing the synchronous formation of the most luminous elliptical galaxies found today at the centres of rich clusters of galaxies.     

A geometric measure of dark energy with pairs of galaxies

Observations indicate that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, which is attributed to a ‘dark energy’ component that opposes gravity. There is a purely geometric test of the expansion of the Universe (the Alcock–Paczynski test), which would provide an independent way of investigating the abundance (Ω(X)) and equation of state (W(X)) of dark energy. It is based on an analysis of the geometrical distortions expected from comparing the real-space and redshift-space shape of distant cosmic structures, but it has proved difficult to implement. Here we report an analysis of the symmetry properties of distant pairs of galaxies from archival data. This allows us to determine that the Universe is flat. By alternately fixing its spatial geometry at Ω(k)≡0 and the dark energy equation-of-state parameter at W(X)≡-1, and using the results of baryon acoustic oscillations, we can establish at the 68.3% confidence level that and -0.85>W(X)>-1.12 and 0.60<Ω(X)<0.80.     

从万有引力出发对黑洞、暗物质和暗能量的分析与理解

万有引力具有两个基本特性：普适性和纯粹吸引作用,重力系统的能量则必须是正定的．从万有引力出发,在牛顿力学的基础上进行简单推导得到了一些关系式,对黑洞、暗物质和暗能量等一些物理课题进行一定程度的分析和理解．     

从万有引力出发对黑洞、暗物质和暗能量的分析与理解

万有引力具有两个基本特性:普适性和纯粹吸引作用,重力系统的能量则必须是正定的.从万有引力出发,在牛顿力学的基础上进行简单推导得到了一些关系式,对黑洞、暗物质和暗能量等一些物理课题进行一定程度的分析和理解.     

浅论宇宙中的暗物质

本文以兹威基对暗物质的首次发现为出发点 .回顾了物理学工作者研究暗物质所走过的坎坷之路 .以天文观测的事实和粒子物理学研究的新成果为根据 ,推测了暗物质存在的空间区域及形态 .     

The moment of truth for WIMP dark matter

We know that dark matter constitutes 85 per cent of all the matter in the Universe, but we do not know of what it is made. Amongst the many dark matter candidates proposed, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) occupy a special place, because they arise naturally from new theories that seek to extend the standard model of particle physics. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and a new generation of astroparticle experiments, the moment of truth has come for WIMPs: either we will discover them in the next five to ten years, or we will witness their inevitable decline.     

Prospects for detecting supersymmetric dark matter in the Galactic halo

Dark matter is the dominant form of matter in the Universe, but its nature is unknown. It is plausibly an elementary particle, perhaps the lightest supersymmetric partner of known particle species. In this case, annihilation of dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way should produce gamma-rays at a level that may soon be observable. Previous work has argued that the annihilation signal will be dominated by emission from very small clumps (perhaps smaller even than the Earth), which would be most easily detected where they cluster together in the dark matter haloes of dwarf satellite galaxies. Here we report that such small-scale structure will, in fact, have a negligible impact on dark matter detectability. Rather, the dominant and probably most easily detectable signal will be produced by diffuse dark matter in the main halo of the Milky Way. If the main halo is strongly detected, then small dark matter clumps should also be visible, but may well contain no stars, thereby confirming a key prediction of the cold dark matter model.     

暗物质存在性的数学预测

分别运用变形Poincar 群法、Boltzmann方程分析与中微子味残存概率法阐述了暗物质的存在性,并介绍了暗物质模型.