18,393 research outputs found
The current status of observational cosmology
Observational cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years.
The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational
constraints coming from structure formation. The transition to precision
cosmology has been spearheaded by measurements of the anisotropy in the cosmic
microwave background (CMB) over the past decade. Observations of the large
scale structure in the distribution of galaxies, high red-shift supernova, have
provided the required complementary information. We review the current status
of cosmological parameter estimates from joint analysis of CMB anisotropy and
large scale structure (LSS) data. We also sound a note of caution on
overstating the successes achieved thus far.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Latex style files included, To appear in the
proceedings of ICGC-04. Minor rewording in the abstract and introductio
Non-Gaussianity and direction dependent systematics in HST key project data
Two new statistics, namely and , based on
extreme value theory, were derived in \cite{gupta08,gupta10}. We use these
statistics to study direction dependence in the HST key project data which
provides the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant. We also study the
non-Gaussianity in this data set using these statistics. Our results for
show that the significance of direction dependent systematics
is restricted to well below one confidence limit, however, presence of
non-Gaussian features is subtle. On the other hand statistic,
which is more sensitive to direction dependence, shows direction dependence
systematics to be at slightly higher confidence level, and the presence of
non-Gaussian features at a level similar to the statistic.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA
Instrumental and sensory characterisation of oleogels for cosmetic use
Oleogels are semisolid systems consisting of an oleogelator (gelling agent) and a lipophilic liquid phase. Despite having some distinct advantages (e.g. absence of preservatives or surfactants), the use of oleogels in cosmetic products is still sporadic. The aim of this study was to compare the effects of different types of oleogelators on instrumental and sensory properties of oleogels made with common emollient types: hydrocarbon, synthetic ester and natural oil
Direction Dependence in Supernova Data: Constraining Isotropy
We revise and extend the extreme value statistic, introduced in \cite{gup08},
to study directional dependence in the high redshift supernova data; arising
either from departures from the cosmological principle or due to direction
dependent statistical systematics in e data. We introduce a likelihood function
that analytically marginalises over the Hubble constant, and use it to extend
our previous statistic. We also introduce a new statistic that is sensitive to
direction dependence arising from living off-centre inside a large void, as
well as previously mentioned reasons for anisotropy. We show that for large
data sets this statistic has a limiting form that can be computed analytically.
We apply our statistics to the gold data sets from \cite{rie04} and
\cite{rie07}, as in our previous work. Our revision and extension of previous
statistic shows that 1) the effect of marginalsing over Hubble constant instead
of using its best fit value has only a marginal effect on our results. However,
correction of errors in our previous work reduce the level of non-Gaussianity
in the 2004 gold data that was found in our earlier work. The revised results
for the 2007 gold data show that the data is consistent with isotropy and
Gaussianity. Our second statistic confirms these results.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Managers
Decoding X-ray observations from centres of galaxy clusters using MCMC
We correct for the use of electron densities instead of total gas density in
the pressure fits which were used to derive the local free-fall times (t) in the original paper
Is there Supernova Evidence for Dark Energy Metamorphosis ?
We reconstruct the equation of state of dark energy (DE) using a
recently released data set containing 172 type Ia supernovae without assuming
the prior (in contrast to previous studies). We find that dark
energy evolves rapidly and metamorphoses from dust-like behaviour at high
( at ) to a strongly negative equation of state at
present (w \lleq -1 at ). Dark energy metamorphosis appears to be
a robust phenomenon which manifests for a large variety of SNe data samples
provided one does not invoke the weak energy prior . Invoking
this prior considerably weakens the rate of growth of . These results
demonstrate that dark energy with an evolving equation of state provides a
compelling alternative to a cosmological constant if data are analysed in a
prior-free manner and the weak energy condition is not imposed by hand.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures. Discussions enhanced. Appendix added on error
propagation with new figures. References updated. Main results unchanged.
Accepted for publication in MNRA
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