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Full-Text Articles in Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity

Revised Age For Cm Draconis And Wd 1633+ 572-Toward A Resolution Of Model-Observation Radius Discrepancies, Gregory A. Feiden, Brian Chaboyer Sep 2014

Revised Age For Cm Draconis And Wd 1633+ 572-Toward A Resolution Of Model-Observation Radius Discrepancies, Gregory A. Feiden, Brian Chaboyer

Dartmouth Scholarship

We report an age revision for the low-mass detached eclipsing binary CM Draconis and its common proper motion companion, WD 1633+572. An age of 8.5 +/- 3.5 Gyr is found by combining an age estimate for the lifetime of WD 1633+572 and an estimate from galactic space motions. The revised age is greater than a factor of two older than previous estimates. Our results provide consistency between the white dwarf age and the system's galactic kinematics, which reveal the system is a highly probable mem


Dark Energy Scaling From Dark Matter To Acceleration, Jannis Bielefeld, Robert R. Caldwell, Eric Linder Aug 2014

Dark Energy Scaling From Dark Matter To Acceleration, Jannis Bielefeld, Robert R. Caldwell, Eric Linder

Dartmouth Scholarship

The dark sector of the Universe need not be completely separable into distinct dark matter and dark energy components. We consider a model of early dark energy in which the dark energy mimics a dark matter component in both evolution and perturbations at early times. Barotropic aether dark energy scales as a fixed fraction, possibly greater than one, of the dark matter density and has vanishing sound speed at early times before undergoing a transition. This gives signatures not only in cosmic expansion but in sound speed and inhomogeneities, and in number of effective neutrino species. Model parameters describe the …


Search For Higgs Shifts In White Dwarfs, Roberto Onofrio, Gary A. Wegner Aug 2014

Search For Higgs Shifts In White Dwarfs, Roberto Onofrio, Gary A. Wegner

Dartmouth Scholarship

We report on a search for differential shifts between electronic and vibronic transitions in carbon-rich white dwarfs BPM 27606 and Procyon B. The absence of differential shifts within the spectral resolution and taking into account systematic effects such as space motion and pressure shifts allows us to set the first upper bound of astrophysical origin on the coupling between the Higgs field and the Kreschmann curvature invariant. Our analysis provides the basis for a more general methodology to derive bounds to the coupling of long-range scalar fields to curvature invariants in an astrophysical setting complementary to the ones available from …


Transition To Order After Hilltop Inflation, Marcelo Gleiser, Noah Graham Mar 2014

Transition To Order After Hilltop Inflation, Marcelo Gleiser, Noah Graham

Dartmouth Scholarship

We investigate the rich nonlinear dynamics during the end of hilltop inflation by numerically solving the coupled Klein-Gordon-Friedmann equations in an expanding universe. In particular, we search for coherent, nonperturbative configurations that may emerge due to the combination of nontrivial couplings between the fields and resonant effects from the cosmological expansion. We couple a massless field to the inflaton to investigate its effect on the existence and stability of coherent configurations and the effective equation of state at reheating. For parameters consistent with data from the Planck and WMAP satellites, and for a wide range of couplings between the inflaton …


Tracing The Evolution Of Active Galactic Nuclei Host Galaxies Over The Last 9 Gyr Of Cosmic Time, A. D. Goulding, W. R. Forman, R. C. Hickox, C. Jones Feb 2014

Tracing The Evolution Of Active Galactic Nuclei Host Galaxies Over The Last 9 Gyr Of Cosmic Time, A. D. Goulding, W. R. Forman, R. C. Hickox, C. Jones

Dartmouth Scholarship

We present the results of a combined galaxy population analysis for the host galaxies of active galactic nuclei (AGN) identified at 0 < z < 1.4 within the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Boötes, and DEEP2 surveys. We identified AGN in a uniform and unbiased manner at X-ray, infrared, and radio wavelengths. Supermassive black holes undergoing radiatively efficient accretion (detected as X-ray and/or infrared AGN) appear to be hosted in a separate and distinct galaxy population than AGN undergoing powerful mechanically dominated accretion (radio AGN). Consistent with some previous studies, radiatively efficient AGN appear to be preferentially hosted in modest star-forming galaxies, with little dependence on AGN or galaxy luminosity. AGN exhibiting radio-emitting jets due to mechanically dominated accretion are almost exclusively observed in massive, passive galaxies. Crucially, we now provide strong evidence that the observed host-galaxy trends are independent of redshift. In particular, these different accretion-mode AGN have remained as separate galaxy populations throughout the last 9 Gyr. Furthermore, it appears that galaxies hosting AGN have evolved along the same path as galaxies that are not hosting AGN with little evidence for distinctly separate evolution.