12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Host: Patricio Gallardo
Martine Lokken (University of Toronto) "Boundless Baryons: the anisotropic superclustering of cosmic gas"
The large-scale distribution of baryons in the cosmic web contains a wealth of cosmological and astrophysical information. At low redshifts, the anisotropy of gas in filaments and superclusters depends both on how dark matter and dark energy shape structure formation, and also on the small-scale galactic feedback processes that eject and heat gas far beyond galaxies. However, most of this gas is challenging to observe due to its diffuse state. The gas leaves faint imprints in the cosmic microwave background through the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect, but these imprints are drowned out by the noise in CMB maps. In this talk, I will describe the /oriented stacking/ technique and show how it boosts the signal-to-noise of extended tSZ measurements by incorporating the anisotropy of filaments and superclusters. I will discuss how we can find regions of high superclustering using features in galaxy survey data, and why these regions are interesting laboratories for cosmology and astrophysics. I will review different approaches to modelling this signal, including insights from hydrodynamic simulations, and demonstrate how applications to real data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Dark Energy Survey are opening new windows into the anisotropic relationships between gas, galaxies, and dark matter.
About speaker: I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto in Canada. I'm interested in the major questions in cosmology: what are dark energy and dark matter? How can the large-scale structure we observe today tell us about the past and future of the universe?
