Anisotropic cosmological solutions to the Y(R)F2Y(R)F^2 gravity

We investigate anisotropic cosmological solutions of the theory with non-minimal couplings between electromagnetic fields and gravity in $Y(R) F^2$ form. After we derive the field equations by the variational principle, we look for spatially flat cosmological solutions with magnetic fields or electric fields. Then we give exact anisotropic solutions by assuming the hyperbolic expansion functions. We observe that the solutions approach to the isotropic case in late-times.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing

We present cosmological parameter constraints from a tomographic weak gravitational lensing analysis of ∼450 deg2 of imaging data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). For a flat Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology with a prior on H0 that encompasses the most recent direct measurements, we find S8≡σ8Ωm/0.3−−−−−−√=0.745±0.039⁠. This result is in good agreement with other low-redshift probes of large-scale structure, including recent cosmic shear results, along with pre-Planck cosmic microwave background constraints. A 2.3σ tension in S8 and ‘substantial discordance’ in the full parameter space is found with respect to the Planck 2015 results. We use shear measurements for nearly 15 million galaxies, determined with a new improved ‘self-calibrating’ version of lensFIT validated using an extensive suite of image simulations. Four-band ugri photometric redshifts are calibrated directly with deep spectroscopic surveys. The redshift calibration is confirmed using two independent techniques based on angular cross-correlations and the properties of the photometric redshift probability distributions. Our covariance matrix is determined using an analytical approach, verified numerically with large mock galaxy catalogues. We account for uncertainties in the modelling of intrinsic galaxy alignments and the impact of baryon feedback on the shape of the non-linear matter power spectrum, in addition to the small residual uncertainties in the shear and redshift calibration. The cosmology analysis was performed blind. Our high-level data products, including shear correlation functions, covariance matrices, redshift distributions, and Monte Carlo Markov chains are available at http://kids.strw.leidenuniv.nl

Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Gas Fuelling of Spiral Galaxies in the Local Universe II. – Direct Measurement of the Dependencies on Redshift and Host Halo Mass of Stellar Mass Growth in Central Disk Galaxies

We present a detailed analysis of the specific star formation rate – stellar mass (sSFR − M*) of z ≤ 0.13 disk central galaxies using a morphologically selected mass-complete sample (M* ≥ 109.5M⊙). Considering samples of grouped and ungrouped galaxies, we find the sSFR − M* relations of disk-dominated central galaxies to have no detectable dependence on host dark-matter halo (DMH) mass, even where weak-lensing measurements indicate a difference in halo mass of a factor ≳ 5. We further detect a gradual evolution of the sSFR − M* relation of non-grouped (field) central disk galaxies with redshift, even over a Δz ≈ 0.04 (≈5 · 108yr) interval, while the scatter remains constant. This evolution is consistent with extrapolation of the ”main-sequence-of-star-forming-galaxies” from previous literature that uses larger redshift baselines and coarser sampling. Taken together, our results present new constraints on the paradigm under which the SFR of galaxies is determined by a self-regulated balance between gas inflows and outflows, and consumption of gas by star-formation in disks, with the inflow being determined by the product of the cosmological accretion rate and a fuelling-efficiency – M ˙ b,halo ζ M˙b,haloζ . In particular, maintaining the paradigm requires M ˙ b,halo ζ M˙b,haloζ to be independent of the mass Mhalo of the host DMH. Furthermore, it requires the fuelling-efficiency ζ to have a strong redshift dependence (∝(1 + z)2.7 for M* = 1010.3M⊙ over z = 0 − 0.13), even though no morphological transformation to spheroids can be invoked to explain this in our disk-dominated sample. The physical mechanisms capable of giving rise to such dependencies of ζ on Mhalo and z for disks are unclea

Survey geometry and the internal consistency of recent cosmic shear measurements

We explore the impact of an update to the typical approximation for the shape noise term in the analytic covariance matrix for cosmic shear experiments that assumes the absence of survey boundary and mask effects. We present an exact expression for the number of galaxy pairs in this term based on the the survey mask, which leads to more than a factor of three increase in the shape noise on the largest measured scales for the Kilo-Degree Survey (KIDS-450) real-space cosmic shear data. We compare the result of this analytic expression to several alternative methods for measuring the shape noise from the data and find excellent agreement. This update to the covariance resolves any internal model tension evidenced by the previously large cosmological best-fit $\chi^2$ for the KiDS-450 cosmic shear data. The best-fit $\chi^2$ is reduced from 161 to 121 for 118 degrees of freedom. We also apply a correction to how the multiplicative shear calibration uncertainty is included in the covariance. This change, along with a previously known update to the reported effective angular values of the data vector, jointly shift the inferred amplitude of the correlation function to higher values. We find that this improves agreement of the KiDS-450 cosmic shear results with Dark Energy Survey Year 1 and Planck results.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; matches accepted versio

Calibration of weak-lensing shear in the Kilo-Degree Survey

We describe and test the pipeline used to measure the weak lensing shear signal from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). It includes a novel method of `self-calibration' that partially corrects for the effect of noise bias. We also discuss the `weight bias' that may arise in optimally-weighted measurements, and present a scheme to mitigate that bias. To study the residual biases arising from both galaxy selection and shear measurement, and to derive an empirical correction to reduce the shear biases to $\lesssim 1\%$, we create a suite of simulated images whose properties are close to those of the KiDS survey observations. We find that the use of `self-calibration' reduces the additive and multiplicative shear biases significantly, although further correction via a calibration scheme is required, which also corrects for a dependence of the bias on galaxy properties. We find that the calibration relation itself is biased by the use of noisy, measured galaxy properties, which may limit the final accuracy that can be achieved. We assess the accuracy of the calibration in the tomographic bins used for the KiDS cosmic shear analysis, testing in particular the effect of possible variations in the uncertain distributions of galaxy size, magnitude and ellipticity, and conclude that the calibration procedure is accurate at the level of multiplicative bias $\lesssim 1\%$ required for the KiDS cosmic shear analysis

Calibration of weak-lensing shear in the Kilo-Degree Survey

We describe and test the pipeline used to measure the weak lensing shear signal from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). It includes a novel method of `self-calibration' that partially corrects for the effect of noise bias. We also discuss the `weight bias' that may arise in optimally-weighted measurements, and present a scheme to mitigate that bias. To study the residual biases arising from both galaxy selection and shear measurement, and to derive an empirical correction to reduce the shear biases to $\lesssim 1\%$, we create a suite of simulated images whose properties are close to those of the KiDS survey observations. We find that the use of `self-calibration' reduces the additive and multiplicative shear biases significantly, although further correction via a calibration scheme is required, which also corrects for a dependence of the bias on galaxy properties. We find that the calibration relation itself is biased by the use of noisy, measured galaxy properties, which may limit the final accuracy that can be achieved. We assess the accuracy of the calibration in the tomographic bins used for the KiDS cosmic shear analysis, testing in particular the effect of possible variations in the uncertain distributions of galaxy size, magnitude and ellipticity, and conclude that the calibration procedure is accurate at the level of multiplicative bias $\lesssim 1\%$ required for the KiDS cosmic shear analysis