Related papers: The mass function
The galaxy luminosity function and galaxy stellar mass function are fundamental statistics in the testing of galaxy formation models. Theoretical predictions based on cosmological simulations can deviate from observations, especially at the…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
The confrontation between general relativity (and its theoretically most plausible deviations) and experimental or observational results is summarized. Some discussion is devoted to the various methodologies used in confronting theory and…
Cosmological observations are a powerful probe of neutrino properties, and in particular of their mass. In this review, we first discuss the role of neutrinos in shaping the cosmological evolution at both the background and perturbation…
There are two observations of galaxies that can offer some insight into the nature of the dark matter (DM), namely the rotation curves and the gravitational lensing. While the first one can be studied using the Newtonian limit, the second…
The quest to build a mass formula which have in it the most relevant microscopic contributions is analyzed. Inspired in the successful Duflo-Zuker mass description, the challenges to describe the shell closures in a more transparent but…
We study halo mass functions with high-resolution $N$-body simulations under a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. Our simulations adopt the cosmological model that is consistent with recent measurements of the cosmic microwave backgrounds with the…
The state of our understanding of cosmology is reviewed from an astrophysical cosmologist point of view with a particular emphasis given to recent observations and their impact. Discussion is then presented on the implications for particle…
Recent studies suggest that the stars in the outer regions of massive galaxies trace halo mass better than the inner regions and that an annular stellar mass provides a low scatter method of selecting galaxy clusters. However, we can only…
A common approach in semi-analytic modeling of galaxy formation is to construct Monte Carlo realizations of merger histories of dark matter halos whose masses are sampled from a halo mass function. Both the mass function itself, and the…
All galaxies are thought to reside within large halos of dark matter, whose properties can only be determined from indirect observations. The formation and assembly of galaxies is determined from the interplay between these dark matter…
We use the Halo Model to explore the implications of assuming that galaxy luminosities in groups are randomly drawn from an underlying luminosity function. We show that even the simplest of such order statistics models -- one in which this…
An ambitious goal in cosmology is to forward-model the observed distribution of galaxies in the nearby Universe today from the initial conditions of large-scale structures. For practical reasons, the spatial resolution at which this can be…
Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…
In the Big Bang about 5% of the mass that was created was in the form of normal baryonic matter (neutrons and protons). Of this about 10% ended up in galaxies in the form of stars or of gas (that can be in molecules, can be atomic, or can…
We review the formalism and applications of the halo-based description of nonlinear gravitational clustering. In this approach, all mass is associated with virialized dark matter halos; models of the number and spatial distribution of the…
We present a halo mass function accurate over the full relevant Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ parameter space based on spherical collapse calculations and calibrated to a suite of modified gravity $N$-body simulations that include massive neutrinos. We…
We revisit the derivation of the mass function and the bias of dark matter halos for non-Gaussian initial conditions. We use a steepest-descent approach to point out that exact results can be obtained for the high-mass tail of the halo mass…
Massive halos hosting groups and clusters of galaxies imprint coherent, arcminute-scale features across the spectrophotometric sky, especially optical-IR clusters of galaxies, distortions in the sub-mm CMB, and extended sources of X-ray…
Various contributions to the cosmological constant are discussed and confronted with its recent measurement. We briefly review different scenarious -- and their difficulties -- for a solution of the cosmological constant problem.