Research Division Seminar
Cosmology with a new observable: Angular Redshift Fluctuations (ARF)

Abstract

In cosmology, it is customary to convert observed redshifts into distances in order to study the large scale distribution of matter probes like galaxies and quasars, and to obtain cosmological constraints thereof. In this talk, I describe a new approach which bypasses such conversion and studies the "field of redshifts" as a new cosmological observable, dubbed thereafter as angular redshift fluctuations (ARF). By comparing linear theory predictions to the output of N-body cosmological simulations, I will show how the ARF are actually sensitive to both the underlying density and radial peculiar velocity fields in the universe, and how one can obtain cosmological and astrophysical constraints from them. And since "the prove of the pudding is in the eating", I will demonstrate how ARF provide, under a very simple setup, competitive constraints on the nature of peculiar velocities and gravity from BOSS DR13 data. Furthermore, I will also show that by combining ARF with maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), we can unveil the signature of the missing (and moving) baryons, doubling the amount of detected baryons in disparate cosmic epochs ranging from z=0 up to z=5, and providing today's most precise description of the spatial distribution of baryons in the universe.