Showing posts with label dark energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dark energy. Show all posts

Uchuu: Universes' creator

If you are a superheroes' comics readers, you probably know All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (if you want, I could publish a review of this comic). At some point in the story, Superman designs a small cubic universe to see what would happen on a planet like Earth without his presence. The development of intelligent life was also included in the Superman's simulation, but in essence even those of astronomers are structured in the same way: a cube of space of finite dimensions whose evolution is driven by a network of dark matter and dark energy.
At the end of the july 2021 it was realased Uchuu, presented as a suite of large high-resolution cosmological N-body simulations, in practice, a simulation that shows the evolution of dark matter structures in a cube of 9.63 billion light years on each side and made up of 2.1 trillion particles.
Uchuu's main goal is to shed light on the dark matter halos surrounding galaxies, but the researchers think that another field of use for their simulation is the study of gravitational lenses.
In any case, it is a tool that could be very useful for improving the algorithms generally used in astronomy to process the data collected by instruments such as satellites and telescopes.
Ishiyama, T., Prada, F., Klypin, A. A., Sinha, M., Metcalf, R. B., Jullo, E., ... & Vega-Martínez, C. A. (2021). The Uchuu simulations: Data Release 1 and dark matter halo concentrations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 506(3), 4210-4231. doi:10.1093/mnras/stab1755 (arXiv)
Read also:
Skies & Universes
Uchuu project on Git-Hub

The void theory

On tumblr, one of my reader, frankietwohats, ask me the following question:
Can I ask you a random question? I can't remember the name of a theory that argued that the universe wasn't expanding, but instead was stretching. Do you happen to know of it/it's name? It came up in conversation today (well, universe expansion did) and I want to look into it more.
I don't know if this is the theory that you intend, but after a briefly research on Google, i find th Void theory. About it, Esther Inglis-Arkell writes on io9:
There was a time that the earth was considered the center of the universe. Then it got knocked out of the way by the sun, and ever since then the astronomer's mantra was, "We are nothing special." The part of the universe the earth resides in can't be any different than any other part. It's not unique, or remarkable, or even out of the ordinary. Void Theory contradicts all that. Instead of sitting in a typical part of the universe, the earth sits in an unusually empty part; a void. The universe isn't expanding due to some mysterious force. It's just that when light comes from a denser part of the universe and trips across the void, it is altered to make it look like the universe is expanding. Since this exansion is the same when observed from any part of the earth, the earth has to be roughly at the center of this void. Suddenly, the observable universe is geocentric again.
But... what is the void theory?

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shalow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.
First of all, following Clifton, Ferreira and Land(1), we must remember that our picture of the universe is based on the following two principles: the spacetime is dynamical, obeying to the Einstein's equations; the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales, that is a generalisation of the Copernican Principle that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position.
Now, the exact solution of Einstein's equations was provided by Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi spacetime \[\text{d} s^2 = -\text{d} t^2 + \frac{Y'^2}{1-K} \text{d} r^2 + Y^2 \text{d} \Omega\] In this model there are four free parameters: the density at the origin, the density and radius at the midpoint, and the radius at which we match to Einstein-de Sitter spacetime(2). Instead the void model:
is completely specfied by the radial profile, the Hubble rate at the void centre today, $H_0$, the radiation density today, which is fixed by the CMB mean temperature, $T_0 = 2.725 K$, and the baryon fraction $f_b = \frac{\rho_b}{\rho_m}$. Outside the void we asymptote to EdS.

The curvature for three different types of voids