Rich Murray
Oct11-06, 01:02 PM
************************************************** ***********
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/17
CSL-1 cosmic string Hubble view due 2006 February,
T Vachaspati, D Huterer, C Hogan: James Renner, freetimes.com:
primordial H filaments easily visible in HUDF background, Murray 2005.12.27
http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=
News&file=article&sid=2809
Free Times: Ohio's premium news, arts and entertainment weekly
Tuesday, December 27, 2005 01:41 AM
Master of the Universe:
A local professor's legacy hinges on a galaxy far, far away
By James Renner jrenner@freetimes.com 216-479-2033 X 253
Vachaspati : [ photo ]
The cosmic string "could be one of the greatest discoveries in history."
NORMALLY, debating the nature of the universe happened in the afternoon.
That's when Tanmay Vachaspati stepped into the office next to his -
the one occupied by postdoctoral student Dragan Huterer -
armed with a bag of almonds and an open mind.
Other times these discussions happened over Friday dinners
at some East Side restaurant with the other
Case Western Reserve University physicists.
Occasionally, they would rant about things like "dark energy"
over drinks at the bar.
But one morning in August 2003, routine was discarded.
Vachaspati was too excited to wait for lunch.
The physics department at Case was buzzing with conversation.
He met up with Huterer over a cup of coffee to talk about the news.
A team of European scientists had just announced a tantalizing discovery.
A photograph appeared to show two identical galaxies sitting side by side
in the heavens. Upon closer inspection, though, it seemed they were actually
one galaxy, its image split in two by some massive invisible object
floating in the void between Cleveland and the edge of the universe.
It could be only one thing: a fabled "cosmic string."
"What can we do to verify this?" asked Vachaspati.
Huterer understood his mentor's excitement and desire for quick
confirmation.
Cosmic strings are remnants of the early universe,
strange gossamers formed just after the Big Bang.
If the universe is a giant lake,
think of these cosmic strings as the cracks that form in the ice
when it freezes over.
They are millions of miles long and thinner than a spaghetti noodle.
Each centimeter of a cosmic string weighs as much as Mount Everest;
they are so heavy they bend light traveling near them.
Cosmic strings gave structure to the early universe,
binding it together, forming galaxies in their gravitational wake.
Vachaspati had been searching for one for nearly 20 years.
Albert Einstein died still searching for a single theory to explain
how the universe works. If the experiment Huterer and Vachaspati
devised in their offices at Case goes as planned,
Einstein may finally be able to rest in peace.
It's four miles from Vachaspati's house in Shaker Heights
to his office on the campus of Case Western Reserve University,
but the physics professor likes to walk.
Along the way, he listens to tracks of classical Indian vocals
he downloads from the Internet.
"This is a great invention," says Vachaspati, showing off his iPod.
"Just beautiful."
During these walks he finds inspiration, new theories
to explain the mysteries of the universe.
"It's undisturbed time. I can just think. That's when the best ideas come."
His office at Case is spartan.
Vachaspati sits behind a large wooden desk, leaning forward
so his dark bangs hang out over eyes wide-open with excitement.
He looks 25, but is really 46.
On the wall is a letter from his 4-year-old daughter.
It reads: "Dear papa you are a hard working man.
You wright long things. I wish I could read Pheseces."
It's her attempt to spell physics, a word she already associates with dad.
Hanging by the door is a framed photograph of Vachaspati's father
standing next to Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics,
a celebrity in the world of theoretical physics. It was Vachaspati's
father - and a magazine subscription -
that propelled him to America in 1980.
In Allahabad, India, it was expensive to subscribe to magazines
from the United States. But Vachaspati's father, also a physicist,
wanted a subscription to a particular science magazine that came free
to new members of the American Physical Society.
So Vachaspati joined APS as a student member to get the magazine
for his father. At the time, information on student members of APS
was given to universities. Soon, Vachaspati was sifting through
brochures from American colleges. He filled out and returned
the applications on a whim. Stony Brook in Long Island and
Tufts in Boston responded with scholarships.
"The only American in town was a psychology professor,"
says Vachaspati. "I asked him which college I should go to.
He said, 'Oh, I like Boston better.'"
When it came time to write his Ph.D. at Tufts,
he devised theories to detect cosmic strings.
These ideas formed the basis of the European discovery.
The team cited Vachaspati in a paper
they published in a Russian science journal.
Vachaspati's work in Cleveland is not limited to hunting cosmic strings,
though. During a recent commute, the physicist thought up a way
to detect Hawking radiation - energy that is ejected from black holes -
in the lab. It involved the creation of something called a "dumbhole,"
an object that gobbles up sound instead of light.
A five-minute-long conversation with this man will blow your mind.
And he has the patience to explain his theories
to the average armchair nerd. He wants people to understand his work
because he's so excited about the possibilities -
especially this potential piece of cosmic string
floating in the void of space.
"I think it could be one of the greatest discoveries in history," he says.
There is no doubt that CSL-1, the name given to the image
of these two identical galaxies, is something odd.
Skeptics say that's all it is, just a pair of galaxies
with remarkable similarities that happen to be nearby each other.
Vachaspati and Huterer hope to silence the opposition
with a new theory they devised in their offices at Case.
"If it's a string, it must be running through this whole region,"
says Vachaspati, pointing to a star chart.
"If you look closely, you should be able to see more pairs," says Huterer.
Simple by concept, but this pair of scientists wanted to make it testable.
So they crunched numbers. Huterer understood the capabilities
of telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope
from his experience searching the skies for signs of dark energy.
Vachaspati understood the nature of cosmic strings.
Working together, a testable theory presented itself.
According to their equations, if a telescope was pointed
in the direction of CSL-1,
five out of 100 objects nearby should also be split,
appearing as identical twins or fractured images.
In February, their theory will put to the test by an independent team
led by Craig Hogan, a physicist at the University of Washington.
His team has reserved time on Hubble.
The satellite will take detailed photographs of CSL-1
during the course of three orbits, using two different light filters.
"Conceivably, if it really is a string, we could see something spectacular,"
says Hogan. "We're looking for more objects that are doubled
or have sharp edges. That would be the smoking gun.
It's an important bit of fundamental physics
that might be staring us in the face."
And if the images prove Vachaspati's theories?
"All the telescopes in the world will be pointing at the thing," says Hogan.
Huterer is more to the point.
"It will certainly win a Nobel prize," he says from his office
at the University of Chicago. Ultimately, the laurels will go
to the European team that discovered CSL-1,
but his mentor's work in Cleveland set them in motion.
"I'm just waiting for the results," says Vachaspati.
"I theorized about these things 20 years ago. Now, they're getting hot."
All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective
owner.
All comments are property of their posters and do not necessarily reflect
the views or opinions of The Cleveland Free Times.
All the rest © 2005 freetimes.com
This web site partially powered by PostNuke, a PHP web portal engine.
PostNuke is released under the GNU/GPL license
Cleveland Free Times
800 W. St. Clair Avenue - 2nd Floor
Cleveland , OH 44113-1266 216-479-2033
************************************************** ***********
http://www.cwru.edu/
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/faculty/index.php?vachaspati
Tanmay Vachaspati Professor of Physics
Ph.D., Tufts University (1985)
txv7@cwru.edu ; Phone: 216-368-0222
Cosmology, Particle Physics and Astrophysics
Interests Publications
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Using cosmological observations to search for topological defects
and primordial magnetic fields,
including Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
temperature anisotropy and polarization, gravitational lensing,
and gravitational waves.
Cosmology of topological defects.
Topological defects in particle physics
especially the standard electroweak model and their role in baryogenesis.
Classification of topological defects. Defect interactions.
Generation of primordial magnetic fields.
The topology of such magnetic fields.
Inflation, eternal inflation and quantum cosmology.
Cosmology in the laboratory and the design of experiments
to test ideas in quantum field theory in curved spacetime
such as Hawking radiation.
A dual model of the known fundamental particles.
http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~dhuterer/
Dragan Huterer
Astronomy and Astrophysics Department
University of Chicago 5640 S. Ellis Ave. Chicago, IL 60637
dhuterer[at]kicp.uchicago.edu ; Office phone: (773) 834-0392
I am an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
and the the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
at the University of Chicago. My field of research is theoretical cosmology.
Before this, I was a postdoc in the Particle-Astrophysics Group
at Case Western Reserve University,
before that a graduate student at the University of Chicago,
before that an undergraduate at MIT,
and still before that a student at Gimnazija "Ognjen Prica"
in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (then Yugoslavia).
I work on trying to understand the nature and properties of "dark energy",
a mysterious component that makes up about 70%
of the energy in the universe and makes it accelerate.
This includes using type Ia supernova measurements,
large-scale structure surveys and weak and strong gravitational lensing
as tools of precision cosmology.
I am also interested in testing the gaussianity and isotropy
of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
And I am a member of the SNAP collaboration,
a team that proposes to study dark energy using an ultimate probe --
a new space telescope, custom-built for this purpose.
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/projects/mpvectors/#contact
Craig J. Copi mpvectors@www.phys.cwru.edu
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/projects/mpvectors/#paper3
Paper 3 August 2, 2005
A paper collecting much of the work involving
multipole vectors performed by us and by others.
It provides a review of the multipole vector formalism and extensions to it.
We focus mainly on the lowest cosmological multipoles (l=2 and 3)
and show that alignment between the planes they define
and the ecliptic persists at > 99.9% C.L.
We explore many other alignments and extend the analysis
in ways to address some systematics.
This paper can be found on astro-ph and has been submitted
to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
You can download the paper with high resolution (and thus large)
figures as either hi-res postscript (compressed, approximately 980kB)
or hi-res pdf (approximately 850kB).
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508047/
Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0508047
From: Craig Copi cjc5@cwru.edu ;
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 20:07:39 GMT (282kb)
On the large-angle anomalies of the microwave sky
Authors:
C. J. Copi (1), cjc5@cwru.edu ;
D. Huterer (2), dhuterer[at]kicp.uchicago.edu ;
D. J. Schwarz (3), dominik.schwarz@cern.ch ;
G. D. Starkman (1) glenn.starkman@case.edu ;
Dominik J. Schwarz, Glenn D. Starkman, Dragan Huterer, and Craig J. Copi
(1) Case Western Reserve University,
(2) University of Chicago,
(3) Universitat Bielefeld)
Comments: 26 pages, 7 figures. High resolution figures,
multipole vector code and other information can be found at this http URL
[Abridged] We apply the multipole vector framework to full-sky maps
derived from the first year WMAP data.
We significantly extend our earlier work
showing that the two lowest cosmologically interesting multipoles,
l=2 and 3, are not statistically isotropic.
These results are compared to the findings obtained using related methods.
In particular, the planes of the quadrupole and the octopole
are unexpectedly aligned.
Moreover, the combined quadrupole plus octopole is surprisingly
aligned with the geometry and direction of motion of the solar system:
the plane they define is perpendicular to the ecliptic plane
and to the plane defined by the dipole direction,
and the ecliptic plane carefully separates stronger from weaker extrema,
running within a couple of degrees of the null-contour
between a maximum and a minimum over more than 120 deg of the sky.
Even given the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole with each other,
we find that their alignment with the ecliptic is unlikely at >98% C.L.,
and argue that it is in fact unlikely at >99.9% C.L.
We explore the role of foregrounds showing that the known
Galactic foregrounds are unlikely to lead to these correlations.
Multipole vectors, like individual a_lm, are very sensitive to sky cuts,
and we demonstrate that analyses using cut skies induce relatively large
errors,
thus weakening the observed correlations
but preserving their consistency with the full-sky results.
Finally we apply our tests to COBE cut-sky maps
and briefly extend the analysis to higher multipoles.
If the correlations we observe are indeed a signal of non-cosmic origin,
then the lack of low-l power will very likely be exacerbated,
with important consequences for our understanding of cosmology on large
scales.
Full-text: PostScript, PDF, or Other formats
Anne M. Green
Stefan Hofmann shofmann@perimeterinstitute.ca ;
Lidia Pieri lidia@physto.se ;
http://www.astro.washington.edu/hogan/
Dr. Craig J. Hogan Professor of Astronomy Professor of Physics
University of Washington PO Box 351202 Seattle, WA 98195
206-685-2112 voice 206-685-0403 fax hogan@u.washington.edu ;
Craig Hogan graduated from Harvard College and went on to
King's College, Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1980.
He held postdoctoral prize fellowships at the University of Chicago
and Caltech, and was on the faculty at the University of Arizona's
Steward Observatory before moving to Seattle in 1990.
>From 1995 to 2001 he served as Chair of Astronomy
and in 2001-2002 as Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences
in the College of Arts and Sciences.
>From 2002 to 2005 he served as UW's Vice Provost for Research.
He has served on boards and advisory committees
for many agencies, laboratories, and research organizations.
Hogan's scholarship in cosmology has been recognized
by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship
and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
As a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team
he was a co-discoverer of the cosmic "Dark Energy"
causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Currently, he is a member of the International Science Team for LISA,
a space mission under development to detect gravitational radiation.
Hogan's current theoretical research centers
on the astrophysical phenomenology of string theory and quantum gravity,
for example in the cosmic background radiation anisotropy,
and the generation and detection of stochastic
gravitational wave backgrounds from events in the early universe
such as phase transitions and the formation of our 3-dimensional space.
Recent technical papers are posted at the astro-ph archive.
His primer on cosmology, "The Little Book of the Big Bang" ,
published by Springer-Verlag, has been translated into
Dutch, Portuguese, German, Italian, Polish, and Greek.
************************************************** ***********
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/16
skeptical note re "RML-1" photo # 31, 3.75 arc-sec wide, from Hubble
Ultra Deep Field, on www.Flickr.com AstroDeep site: Motl:
Murray 2005.11.21
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/11/cosmic-string-or-dark-matter.html
Lubos Motl's Reference Frame blog
http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/sf/frames.html
Lubos Motl motl@feynman.harvard.edu
(pronounce: "Loo-bosch Maw-tull")
Friday, November 11, 2005
Cosmic string or dark matter
I just received a mail from Rich Murray who has taken many pictures of the
region near CSL-1, the "cosmic string lensing" candidate.
See his pictures at flickr.com
For example, the newest picture #31 at the top includes "RML-1" which
stands for "Rich Murray Lens 1", but I remain somewhat unconvinced
that this rather amateurish picture proves anything.
The primary recipient of the e-mail was Malcolm Fairbairn who just
posted an interesting paper arguing that if the CSL-1 event is caused
by lensing, it is likely to be a cosmic string rather than a dark
matter filament because in the latter case, the corresponding tidally
disrupted dark matter halo would have to be as heavy as the Milky Way
-- and such a halo seems to be absent in other data.
This was always our primary worry -- that CSL-1 could be caused by
lensing by something that just acts as a string but can be of a rather
conventional origin.
posted by Lumo at 11:18 PM
fast comments (2) | Trackback (0); 0 internal comments:
Post a Comment
************************************************** ***********
November 21, 2005
Well, "...I remain somewhat unconvinced that this rather amateurish
picture proves anything." is the highest praise that this absolute
amateur has so far received since June.
I was surprised to see the number of visits to the 31 photos on
www.Flickr.com site, AstroDeep , jumping from just over 200 to now
866, so I am grateful to know who to credit -- Thanks!
Only the first 17 photos are from the CSL-1 field, the next two are
from the Millenium Simulation, then 20 to 31 are selected and imaged
processed from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. More important than the
possibility that the double blue galaxy in #31 is lensed by a cosmic
string, are the myriad bright blue 1-2 pixel (0.03 arc-sec) sources,
which are always on a faint, but obvious upon scrutiny, fractile 3D
dark mesh, that is backlit by a uniform faint maroon glow.
Just 104 views so far of this one -- I welcome all feedback -- no need
to be positive or even polite, though humor is always appreciated....
Rich Murray rmforall@comcast.net
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 505-501-2298
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/15
two classes of readily noticeable common, ubiquitous, uniform bright
blue sources in deep background (Murray mesh) of HUDF, dwarf galaxy
luminous bare clumps, hyper novae?: 2005.04.01 BG and DM Elmegreen:
Malcolm Fairbairn: Murray 2005.11.11
[ You can search the title on Google Groups to find this post. ]
************************************************** ***********
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/15
two classes of readily noticeable common, ubiquitous, uniform bright
blue sources in deep background (Murray mesh) of HUDF, dwarf galaxy
luminous bare clumps, hyper novae?: 2005.04.01 BG and DM Elmegreen:
Malcolm Fairbairn: Murray 2005.11.11
************************************************** ***********
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/17
CSL-1 cosmic string Hubble view due 2006 February,
T Vachaspati, D Huterer, C Hogan: James Renner, freetimes.com:
primordial H filaments easily visible in HUDF background, Murray 2005.12.27
http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=
News&file=article&sid=2809
Free Times: Ohio's premium news, arts and entertainment weekly
Tuesday, December 27, 2005 01:41 AM
Master of the Universe:
A local professor's legacy hinges on a galaxy far, far away
By James Renner jrenner@freetimes.com 216-479-2033 X 253
Vachaspati : [ photo ]
The cosmic string "could be one of the greatest discoveries in history."
NORMALLY, debating the nature of the universe happened in the afternoon.
That's when Tanmay Vachaspati stepped into the office next to his -
the one occupied by postdoctoral student Dragan Huterer -
armed with a bag of almonds and an open mind.
Other times these discussions happened over Friday dinners
at some East Side restaurant with the other
Case Western Reserve University physicists.
Occasionally, they would rant about things like "dark energy"
over drinks at the bar.
But one morning in August 2003, routine was discarded.
Vachaspati was too excited to wait for lunch.
The physics department at Case was buzzing with conversation.
He met up with Huterer over a cup of coffee to talk about the news.
A team of European scientists had just announced a tantalizing discovery.
A photograph appeared to show two identical galaxies sitting side by side
in the heavens. Upon closer inspection, though, it seemed they were actually
one galaxy, its image split in two by some massive invisible object
floating in the void between Cleveland and the edge of the universe.
It could be only one thing: a fabled "cosmic string."
"What can we do to verify this?" asked Vachaspati.
Huterer understood his mentor's excitement and desire for quick
confirmation.
Cosmic strings are remnants of the early universe,
strange gossamers formed just after the Big Bang.
If the universe is a giant lake,
think of these cosmic strings as the cracks that form in the ice
when it freezes over.
They are millions of miles long and thinner than a spaghetti noodle.
Each centimeter of a cosmic string weighs as much as Mount Everest;
they are so heavy they bend light traveling near them.
Cosmic strings gave structure to the early universe,
binding it together, forming galaxies in their gravitational wake.
Vachaspati had been searching for one for nearly 20 years.
Albert Einstein died still searching for a single theory to explain
how the universe works. If the experiment Huterer and Vachaspati
devised in their offices at Case goes as planned,
Einstein may finally be able to rest in peace.
It's four miles from Vachaspati's house in Shaker Heights
to his office on the campus of Case Western Reserve University,
but the physics professor likes to walk.
Along the way, he listens to tracks of classical Indian vocals
he downloads from the Internet.
"This is a great invention," says Vachaspati, showing off his iPod.
"Just beautiful."
During these walks he finds inspiration, new theories
to explain the mysteries of the universe.
"It's undisturbed time. I can just think. That's when the best ideas come."
His office at Case is spartan.
Vachaspati sits behind a large wooden desk, leaning forward
so his dark bangs hang out over eyes wide-open with excitement.
He looks 25, but is really 46.
On the wall is a letter from his 4-year-old daughter.
It reads: "Dear papa you are a hard working man.
You wright long things. I wish I could read Pheseces."
It's her attempt to spell physics, a word she already associates with dad.
Hanging by the door is a framed photograph of Vachaspati's father
standing next to Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics,
a celebrity in the world of theoretical physics. It was Vachaspati's
father - and a magazine subscription -
that propelled him to America in 1980.
In Allahabad, India, it was expensive to subscribe to magazines
from the United States. But Vachaspati's father, also a physicist,
wanted a subscription to a particular science magazine that came free
to new members of the American Physical Society.
So Vachaspati joined APS as a student member to get the magazine
for his father. At the time, information on student members of APS
was given to universities. Soon, Vachaspati was sifting through
brochures from American colleges. He filled out and returned
the applications on a whim. Stony Brook in Long Island and
Tufts in Boston responded with scholarships.
"The only American in town was a psychology professor,"
says Vachaspati. "I asked him which college I should go to.
He said, 'Oh, I like Boston better.'"
When it came time to write his Ph.D. at Tufts,
he devised theories to detect cosmic strings.
These ideas formed the basis of the European discovery.
The team cited Vachaspati in a paper
they published in a Russian science journal.
Vachaspati's work in Cleveland is not limited to hunting cosmic strings,
though. During a recent commute, the physicist thought up a way
to detect Hawking radiation - energy that is ejected from black holes -
in the lab. It involved the creation of something called a "dumbhole,"
an object that gobbles up sound instead of light.
A five-minute-long conversation with this man will blow your mind.
And he has the patience to explain his theories
to the average armchair nerd. He wants people to understand his work
because he's so excited about the possibilities -
especially this potential piece of cosmic string
floating in the void of space.
"I think it could be one of the greatest discoveries in history," he says.
There is no doubt that CSL-1, the name given to the image
of these two identical galaxies, is something odd.
Skeptics say that's all it is, just a pair of galaxies
with remarkable similarities that happen to be nearby each other.
Vachaspati and Huterer hope to silence the opposition
with a new theory they devised in their offices at Case.
"If it's a string, it must be running through this whole region,"
says Vachaspati, pointing to a star chart.
"If you look closely, you should be able to see more pairs," says Huterer.
Simple by concept, but this pair of scientists wanted to make it testable.
So they crunched numbers. Huterer understood the capabilities
of telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope
from his experience searching the skies for signs of dark energy.
Vachaspati understood the nature of cosmic strings.
Working together, a testable theory presented itself.
According to their equations, if a telescope was pointed
in the direction of CSL-1,
five out of 100 objects nearby should also be split,
appearing as identical twins or fractured images.
In February, their theory will put to the test by an independent team
led by Craig Hogan, a physicist at the University of Washington.
His team has reserved time on Hubble.
The satellite will take detailed photographs of CSL-1
during the course of three orbits, using two different light filters.
"Conceivably, if it really is a string, we could see something spectacular,"
says Hogan. "We're looking for more objects that are doubled
or have sharp edges. That would be the smoking gun.
It's an important bit of fundamental physics
that might be staring us in the face."
And if the images prove Vachaspati's theories?
"All the telescopes in the world will be pointing at the thing," says Hogan.
Huterer is more to the point.
"It will certainly win a Nobel prize," he says from his office
at the University of Chicago. Ultimately, the laurels will go
to the European team that discovered CSL-1,
but his mentor's work in Cleveland set them in motion.
"I'm just waiting for the results," says Vachaspati.
"I theorized about these things 20 years ago. Now, they're getting hot."
All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective
owner.
All comments are property of their posters and do not necessarily reflect
the views or opinions of The Cleveland Free Times.
All the rest © 2005 freetimes.com
This web site partially powered by PostNuke, a PHP web portal engine.
PostNuke is released under the GNU/GPL license
Cleveland Free Times
800 W. St. Clair Avenue - 2nd Floor
Cleveland , OH 44113-1266 216-479-2033
************************************************** ***********
http://www.cwru.edu/
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/faculty/index.php?vachaspati
Tanmay Vachaspati Professor of Physics
Ph.D., Tufts University (1985)
txv7@cwru.edu ; Phone: 216-368-0222
Cosmology, Particle Physics and Astrophysics
Interests Publications
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Using cosmological observations to search for topological defects
and primordial magnetic fields,
including Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
temperature anisotropy and polarization, gravitational lensing,
and gravitational waves.
Cosmology of topological defects.
Topological defects in particle physics
especially the standard electroweak model and their role in baryogenesis.
Classification of topological defects. Defect interactions.
Generation of primordial magnetic fields.
The topology of such magnetic fields.
Inflation, eternal inflation and quantum cosmology.
Cosmology in the laboratory and the design of experiments
to test ideas in quantum field theory in curved spacetime
such as Hawking radiation.
A dual model of the known fundamental particles.
http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~dhuterer/
Dragan Huterer
Astronomy and Astrophysics Department
University of Chicago 5640 S. Ellis Ave. Chicago, IL 60637
dhuterer[at]kicp.uchicago.edu ; Office phone: (773) 834-0392
I am an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
and the the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
at the University of Chicago. My field of research is theoretical cosmology.
Before this, I was a postdoc in the Particle-Astrophysics Group
at Case Western Reserve University,
before that a graduate student at the University of Chicago,
before that an undergraduate at MIT,
and still before that a student at Gimnazija "Ognjen Prica"
in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (then Yugoslavia).
I work on trying to understand the nature and properties of "dark energy",
a mysterious component that makes up about 70%
of the energy in the universe and makes it accelerate.
This includes using type Ia supernova measurements,
large-scale structure surveys and weak and strong gravitational lensing
as tools of precision cosmology.
I am also interested in testing the gaussianity and isotropy
of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
And I am a member of the SNAP collaboration,
a team that proposes to study dark energy using an ultimate probe --
a new space telescope, custom-built for this purpose.
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/projects/mpvectors/#contact
Craig J. Copi mpvectors@www.phys.cwru.edu
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/projects/mpvectors/#paper3
Paper 3 August 2, 2005
A paper collecting much of the work involving
multipole vectors performed by us and by others.
It provides a review of the multipole vector formalism and extensions to it.
We focus mainly on the lowest cosmological multipoles (l=2 and 3)
and show that alignment between the planes they define
and the ecliptic persists at > 99.9% C.L.
We explore many other alignments and extend the analysis
in ways to address some systematics.
This paper can be found on astro-ph and has been submitted
to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
You can download the paper with high resolution (and thus large)
figures as either hi-res postscript (compressed, approximately 980kB)
or hi-res pdf (approximately 850kB).
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508047/
Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0508047
From: Craig Copi cjc5@cwru.edu ;
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 20:07:39 GMT (282kb)
On the large-angle anomalies of the microwave sky
Authors:
C. J. Copi (1), cjc5@cwru.edu ;
D. Huterer (2), dhuterer[at]kicp.uchicago.edu ;
D. J. Schwarz (3), dominik.schwarz@cern.ch ;
G. D. Starkman (1) glenn.starkman@case.edu ;
Dominik J. Schwarz, Glenn D. Starkman, Dragan Huterer, and Craig J. Copi
(1) Case Western Reserve University,
(2) University of Chicago,
(3) Universitat Bielefeld)
Comments: 26 pages, 7 figures. High resolution figures,
multipole vector code and other information can be found at this http URL
[Abridged] We apply the multipole vector framework to full-sky maps
derived from the first year WMAP data.
We significantly extend our earlier work
showing that the two lowest cosmologically interesting multipoles,
l=2 and 3, are not statistically isotropic.
These results are compared to the findings obtained using related methods.
In particular, the planes of the quadrupole and the octopole
are unexpectedly aligned.
Moreover, the combined quadrupole plus octopole is surprisingly
aligned with the geometry and direction of motion of the solar system:
the plane they define is perpendicular to the ecliptic plane
and to the plane defined by the dipole direction,
and the ecliptic plane carefully separates stronger from weaker extrema,
running within a couple of degrees of the null-contour
between a maximum and a minimum over more than 120 deg of the sky.
Even given the alignment of the quadrupole and octopole with each other,
we find that their alignment with the ecliptic is unlikely at >98% C.L.,
and argue that it is in fact unlikely at >99.9% C.L.
We explore the role of foregrounds showing that the known
Galactic foregrounds are unlikely to lead to these correlations.
Multipole vectors, like individual a_lm, are very sensitive to sky cuts,
and we demonstrate that analyses using cut skies induce relatively large
errors,
thus weakening the observed correlations
but preserving their consistency with the full-sky results.
Finally we apply our tests to COBE cut-sky maps
and briefly extend the analysis to higher multipoles.
If the correlations we observe are indeed a signal of non-cosmic origin,
then the lack of low-l power will very likely be exacerbated,
with important consequences for our understanding of cosmology on large
scales.
Full-text: PostScript, PDF, or Other formats
Anne M. Green
Stefan Hofmann shofmann@perimeterinstitute.ca ;
Lidia Pieri lidia@physto.se ;
http://www.astro.washington.edu/hogan/
Dr. Craig J. Hogan Professor of Astronomy Professor of Physics
University of Washington PO Box 351202 Seattle, WA 98195
206-685-2112 voice 206-685-0403 fax hogan@u.washington.edu ;
Craig Hogan graduated from Harvard College and went on to
King's College, Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1980.
He held postdoctoral prize fellowships at the University of Chicago
and Caltech, and was on the faculty at the University of Arizona's
Steward Observatory before moving to Seattle in 1990.
>From 1995 to 2001 he served as Chair of Astronomy
and in 2001-2002 as Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences
in the College of Arts and Sciences.
>From 2002 to 2005 he served as UW's Vice Provost for Research.
He has served on boards and advisory committees
for many agencies, laboratories, and research organizations.
Hogan's scholarship in cosmology has been recognized
by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship
and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
As a member of the High-z Supernova Search Team
he was a co-discoverer of the cosmic "Dark Energy"
causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Currently, he is a member of the International Science Team for LISA,
a space mission under development to detect gravitational radiation.
Hogan's current theoretical research centers
on the astrophysical phenomenology of string theory and quantum gravity,
for example in the cosmic background radiation anisotropy,
and the generation and detection of stochastic
gravitational wave backgrounds from events in the early universe
such as phase transitions and the formation of our 3-dimensional space.
Recent technical papers are posted at the astro-ph archive.
His primer on cosmology, "The Little Book of the Big Bang" ,
published by Springer-Verlag, has been translated into
Dutch, Portuguese, German, Italian, Polish, and Greek.
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/16
skeptical note re "RML-1" photo # 31, 3.75 arc-sec wide, from Hubble
Ultra Deep Field, on www.Flickr.com AstroDeep site: Motl:
Murray 2005.11.21
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/11/cosmic-string-or-dark-matter.html
Lubos Motl's Reference Frame blog
http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/sf/frames.html
Lubos Motl motl@feynman.harvard.edu
(pronounce: "Loo-bosch Maw-tull")
Friday, November 11, 2005
Cosmic string or dark matter
I just received a mail from Rich Murray who has taken many pictures of the
region near CSL-1, the "cosmic string lensing" candidate.
See his pictures at flickr.com
For example, the newest picture #31 at the top includes "RML-1" which
stands for "Rich Murray Lens 1", but I remain somewhat unconvinced
that this rather amateurish picture proves anything.
The primary recipient of the e-mail was Malcolm Fairbairn who just
posted an interesting paper arguing that if the CSL-1 event is caused
by lensing, it is likely to be a cosmic string rather than a dark
matter filament because in the latter case, the corresponding tidally
disrupted dark matter halo would have to be as heavy as the Milky Way
-- and such a halo seems to be absent in other data.
This was always our primary worry -- that CSL-1 could be caused by
lensing by something that just acts as a string but can be of a rather
conventional origin.
posted by Lumo at 11:18 PM
fast comments (2) | Trackback (0); 0 internal comments:
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November 21, 2005
Well, "...I remain somewhat unconvinced that this rather amateurish
picture proves anything." is the highest praise that this absolute
amateur has so far received since June.
I was surprised to see the number of visits to the 31 photos on
www.Flickr.com site, AstroDeep , jumping from just over 200 to now
866, so I am grateful to know who to credit -- Thanks!
Only the first 17 photos are from the CSL-1 field, the next two are
from the Millenium Simulation, then 20 to 31 are selected and imaged
processed from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. More important than the
possibility that the double blue galaxy in #31 is lensed by a cosmic
string, are the myriad bright blue 1-2 pixel (0.03 arc-sec) sources,
which are always on a faint, but obvious upon scrutiny, fractile 3D
dark mesh, that is backlit by a uniform faint maroon glow.
Just 104 views so far of this one -- I welcome all feedback -- no need
to be positive or even polite, though humor is always appreciated....
Rich Murray rmforall@comcast.net
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 505-501-2298
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/15
two classes of readily noticeable common, ubiquitous, uniform bright
blue sources in deep background (Murray mesh) of HUDF, dwarf galaxy
luminous bare clumps, hyper novae?: 2005.04.01 BG and DM Elmegreen:
Malcolm Fairbairn: Murray 2005.11.11
[ You can search the title on Google Groups to find this post. ]
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/15
two classes of readily noticeable common, ubiquitous, uniform bright
blue sources in deep background (Murray mesh) of HUDF, dwarf galaxy
luminous bare clumps, hyper novae?: 2005.04.01 BG and DM Elmegreen:
Malcolm Fairbairn: Murray 2005.11.11
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