How can simulations help us measure dark energy and its effects on the universe?

[wolram]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080110194502.htm


Results of the simulations, carried out by Durham University's world-leading Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), tell researchers how to measure dark energy -- a repulsive force that counteracts gravity.

 

[wolram]

What are these sound waves?

The simulations, which took 11 days to run on Durham's unique Cosmology Machine (COSMA) computer, looked at tiny ripples in the distribution of matter in the Universe made by sound waves a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

 

[Nereid]

I think the "Findings are published January 11 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" refers to this paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008MNRAS.383..755A".

Abstract:

We assess the detectability of baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) in the power spectrum of galaxies using ultralarge volume N-body simulations of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter and semi-analytical modelling of galaxy formation. A step-by-step illustration is given of the various effects (non-linear fluctuation growth, peculiar motions, non-linear and scale-dependent bias) which systematically change the form of the galaxy power spectrum on large scales from the simple prediction of linear perturbation theory. Using a new method to extract the scale of the oscillations, we nevertheless find that the BAO approach gives an unbiased estimate of the sound horizon scale. Sampling variance remains the dominant source of error despite the huge volume of our simulation box (=2.41h-3Gpc3). We use our results to forecast the accuracy with which forthcoming surveys will be able to measure the sound horizon scale, s, and, hence constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter, w (with simplifying assumptions and without marginalizing over the other cosmological parameters). Pan-STARRS could potentially yield a measurement with an accuracy of Δs/s = 0.5-0.7 per cent (corresponding to Δw ~ 2-3 per cent), which is competitive with the proposed WFMOS survey (Δs/s = 1 per cent Δw ~ 4 per cent). Achieving Δw <= 1 per cent using BAO alone is beyond any currently commissioned project and will require an all-sky spectroscopic survey, such as would be undertaken by the SPACE mission concept under proposal to ESA.

The 'sound waves' referred to are baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) ... an exciting, relatively new, field in observational cosmology.