English

Dark energy and neutrino mass constraints from weak lensing, supernova, and relative galaxy ages

Astrophysics 2008-10-21 v1

Abstract

We use the current weak lensing data to constrain the equation of state of dark energy ww and the total mass of massive neutrinos mν\sum m_{\nu}. The constraint on ww would be weak if only the current weak lensing data are used. With the addition of other observational data such as the type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillation, and the high redshift Hubble parameter data H(z)H(z) derived from relative galaxy ages to break the degeneracy, the result is significantly improved. For the pure wwCDM model without massive neutrinos, we find w=1.000.12+0.10w=-1.00^{+0.10}_{-0.12}. For the wwCDM model with the massive neutrino component, we show that the constraint on ww is almost unchanged, there is very little degeneracy between ww and mν\sum m_{\nu}. After marginalizing over other parameters, we obtain the probability distribution function of mν\sum m_{\nu}, and find that the upper limit is mν0.8\sum m_{\nu} \leq 0.8 eV at 95.5% confidence level for the combined data sets. Our constraints of ww and mν\sum m_{\nu} are both compatible and comparable with the constraints obtained from the WMAP 5-year data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0810.3572,
  title  = {Dark energy and neutrino mass constraints from weak lensing, supernova, and relative galaxy ages},
  author = {Yan Gong and Tong-Jie Zhang and Tian Lan and Xue-Lei Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.3572},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures