A&A 476, 83-88 (2007)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20078478
M. Maturi1,2 - K. Dolag2 - A. Waelkens2 - V. Springel2 - T. Enßlin2
1 - Zentrum für Astronomie, ITA, Universität
Heidelberg, Albert-Überle-Str. 2, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
2 -
Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics,
Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85741 Garching, Germany
Received 14 August 2007 / Accepted 21 September 2007
Abstract
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have
revealed an unexpected quadrupole-octopole alignment along a
preferred axis pointing toward the Virgo cluster. We here
investigate whether this feature can be explained in the framework
of the concordance model by secondary anisotropies produced by the
non-linear evolution of the gravitational potential, the so-called
Rees-Sciama (RS) effect. We focus on the effect caused by the local
superclusters, which we calculate using a constrained
high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation, based on the IRAS 1.2-Jy
all-sky galaxy redshift survey, which reproduces the main structures
of our Universe out to a distance of
from our
Galaxy. The resulting RS effect peaks at low multipoles and has a
minimum/maximum amplitude of
/
.
Even though its quadrupole is well aligned with the one
measured for the CMB, its amplitude is not sufficient to explain the
observed magnitude of the quadrupole/octopole alignment. To have an
effect comparable to the actual CMB fluctuations, photons traversing
the local cosmic structures would need to experience a five/ten
times larger gravitational redshift than would be expected in a
standard scenario with dark matter and Newtonian gravity. In
addition, we analyze the WMAP-3 data with a linear matched filter in
an attempt to determine an upper limit for the RS signal amplitude
on large scales. We found that it is possible to infer a weak upper
limit of
for its maximum amplitude.
Key words: cosmic microwave background
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations of the
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (Hinshaw et al. 2006; Spergel et al. 2003) turned out to
be in very good agreement with the predictions of the concordance
-CDM cosmology. However, the WMAP data also present a number
of unexpected features at large angular scales. In particular, these
include the small amplitude of the quadrupole (Spergel et al. 2003), as
already noticed to be present within the COBE data by Hinshaw et al. (1996),
the alignment between the CMB quadrupole and octopole, which are seen
to point toward the direction of Virgo (Tegmark et al. 2003), the planarity
of the octopole (de Oliveira-Costa et al. 2004), the alignment between the combined
quadrupole and octopole momenta with the equinox and the ecliptic
plane (Schwarz et al. 2004; Copi et al. 2006), the localized source of non-gaussianity
(the cold spot) on angular scale
(Vielva et al. 2004; Cruz et al. 2005),
and the asymmetry of the large-scale power between the two galactic
hemispheres (Eriksen et al. 2004; Hansen et al. 2004). The latter seems to be the most
relevant one.
Different possible explanations for some of these features have been proposed, including a small universe with a cut-off scale below the cosmological horizon (Spergel et al. 2003), anisotropic universes such as Bianchi models (Jaffe et al. 2005; Kogut et al. 1997; Bunn et al. 1996), quintessence models (Dedeo et al. 2003) or local dust-filled voids (Inoue & Silk 2006).
In the framework of the concordance
-CDM cosmology, we
explore the possibility of explaining the above "anomalies'' with the
secondary CMB anisotropies produced by the evolution of the
gravitational potentials of the local cosmological structures. These
anisotropies are usually split into the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW)
effect (ISW; Hu & Sugiyama 1994; Sachs & Wolfe 1967) and into the Rees-Sciama effect
(RS; Seljak 1996; Rees & Sciama 1968; Martinez-Gonzalez et al. 1990), which are produced by the
linear and the non-linear evolution of the potential, respectively. We
focus our attention on the RS effect although our simulation also
includes the local ISW effect. However, the former is dominant over
the latter in the volume we consider. We ignore distant structures
beyond
,
because their contribution to the RS effect
is negligible at low multipoles (see for e.g. Cooray 2002; Seljak 1996).
![]() |
Figure 1:
Full sky map of the Rees-Sciama effect produced by the
local universe within a sphere of radius
|
| Open with DEXTER | |
A first study of the RS imprint from the local universe has been
carried out by Cooray & Seto (2005). They used a toy-model with two spherical
mass concentrations of
and
to represent the Great Attractor and the
Shapley concentration, and estimated a RS effect with a maximum
amplitude of
.
Similarly, Rakic et al. (2006) modeled
the Shapley concentration with a spherical over-density
(Lamaître-Tolman-Bondi model) with the Local Group falling into
it. They estimate a RS signal which may amount to
and conclude that the RS effect is not compatible with the
features found in the WMAP data.
We use a high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation whose initial
conditions were constrained to reproduce the density and velocity
fields inferred with the IRAS 1.2-Jy all-sky galaxy redshift
survey. The simulation gives a realistic picture of the local universe
within a sphere of radius
centered on our Galaxy. We
use this simulation to obtain the expected RS effect on large scales
in the full sky, and to define an optimal linear filter for measuring
it in the WMAP-3 data.
The structure of the paper is as follows. In Sect. 2, we present the numerical simulation and the computation of the full sky map of the RS effect. In Sect. 3 we describe our analysis of the RS signal, and in Sect. 4 we propose a method based on a matched optimal filter to determine an upper limit for the amplitude of the RS effect in real data. Finally, we present our conclusions in Sect. 5.
The results presented in this paper have been obtained by using the
z=0 output of a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation of the local
universe. We used initial conditions similar to those adopted by
Mathis et al. (2002) in their study (based on a pure N-body simulation) of
structure formation in the local universe. The galaxy distribution in
the IRAS 1.2-Jy galaxy survey is first smoothed with a Gaussian filter
on a scale of 7 Mpc and then linearly evolved back in time up to
z=50, following the method proposed by Kolatt et al. (1996). The resulting
field is then used as a Gaussian constraint (Hoffman & Ribak 1991) for an
otherwise random realization of a flat
-CDM model, for which
we assume a present matter density parameter
,
a
Hubble constant H0=70 km s-1Mpc-1 and rms density fluctuations of
in spheres of comoving radius
,
with
h=0.7.
The volume that is constrained by the observational data covers a
sphere of radius
centered on the Milky Way. This
region is sampled with more than 50 million high-resolution dark
matter particles and is embedded in a periodic box of size
343
Mpc on a side. The region outside the constrained volume is filled
with nearly 7 million low-resolution dark matter particles, allowing a
good coverage of long-range gravitational tidal forces that affect the
high resolution region.
The analysis by Mathis et al. (2002) demonstrated that the evolved state of
these initial conditions provides a good match to the density and
velocity fields of the large-scale structure observed in the local
universe. Unlike in the original simulation by Mathis et al. (2002), we
however also follow the evolution of the gas distribution. To
accomplish this we extended the initial conditions by splitting each
of the original high-resolution particles into a gas and a dark matter
particle, having masses of
and
,
respectively; this corresponds to a
cosmological baryon fraction of 13 per cent. The total number of
particles within the simulation is then slightly more than 108
million.
Our simulation run has been carried out with GADGET-2 (Springel 2005), a new version of the parallel Tree-SPH simulation code GADGET (Springel et al. 2001) with an entropy-conserving formulation of SPH (Springel & Hernquist 2002). The simulation neglected radiative cooling processes and employed a comoving gravitational force resolution (i.e. the comoving softening length) of 14 kpc (Plummer-equivalent), which is comparable to the inter-particle separation reached by the SPH particles in the dense centers of our simulated galaxy clusters. Previously, the same simulation has been used to study the propagation of cosmic rays and to predict the SZ-effect from diffuse hot gas in the local universe (Dolag et al. 2005a,b).
In this work we neglect the contribution of all structures placed at a
distance larger than
,
because the volume covered by
our simulation is sufficiently large to account for all relevant
sources of the RS effect that contribute to the low multipoles
we are interested in (see for e.g. Cooray 2002; Seljak 1996, where the total RS power
spectrum is shown to peak at 30<l). For example, the
RS imprint of a galaxy cluster placed just outside the considered
volume would subtend RS features with scales typically smaller than
,
i.e. corresponding to multipoles larger than
(see for e.g. Maturi et al. 2007). We note that the RS
effect of galaxy clusters can also be related to their gravitational
lensing deflection field (Birkinshaw & Gull 1983) whose typical scale is at most
of the order of
.
The inclusion of the neglected large
volume beyond
would be possible through larger
numerical simulations (see for e.g. Springel et al. 2005) or through
analytical modeling. However, a direct simulation approach would in
general fail to reproduce the real matter distribution and dynamics,
and hence fail to match with its induced RS effect the actual
orientation of the low multipoles of the CMB.
Photons change their energy when they traverse evolving gravitational
potentials. This effect introduces secondary anisotropies in the CMB,
which are usually split into two terms: the integrated Sachs-Wolfe
effect (ISW, Sachs & Wolfe 1967) and the Rees-Sciama effect
(RS, Rees & Sciama 1968), produced by the linear and the non-linear
evolution of the potential, respectively. The resulting anisotropies
can be calculated as
In order to estimate the secondary anisotropies due to the local
universe from our simulation we consider a Newtonian approximation
where the gravitational potential is defined as
![]() |
(2) |
We directly solve Eq. (3) with a modified version
of the parallel code GADGET-2 (Springel 2005), whose original
version solves numerically a similar integral to compute the
gravitational forces. The RS map is finally obtained by adopting the
HEALPix pixelization of the sky (Górski et al. 2005) with parameter
,
i.e. the pixels on the sky extend over
6.8' on a
side, and by evaluating Eq. (1) at each pixel
position. We compute the integral along the line-of-sight as a direct
sum by sampling
at regular intervals of
between the radius
and
.
In doing so we include only the high
resolution region of the numerical simulation in order to avoid any
border effects. In this volume, the resolution is good enough to
properly sample the RS signal down to the typical cluster core scale.
The resulting full-sky RS map due to the local universe is shown in
Fig. 1. The main features are minima centered on
those structures of the numerical simulation which correspond to the
galaxy clusters of A3637, Virgo, Centaurus, Hydra and Perseus. The
strongest of these signatures is related to Perseus (on the galactic
equator, left hand side) with a negative peak of
,
while the structure corresponding to the cluster of Coma shows a very
small contribution to the overall RS signal. The RS effects of other
prominent clusters are visible, but their overall impact is
negligible. The RS map slightly favors negative values because we
sample a region of the universe populated by forming structures with
an ongoing gravitational collapse.
![]() |
Figure 2:
Angular power spectra of the CMB, the RS effect from the
local universe and the noise of WMAP (
|
| Open with DEXTER | |
The power spectra of our RS map, of the primary CMB, and of the instrumental noise of WMAP and of the upcoming Planck experiment are shown in Fig. 2. The RS signal is dominated by large-scale features which are only above the instrumental noise level for a few multipoles (l<6 for WMAP and l<30 for Planck). However, the RS signal is always well below the CMB primary fluctuations even on the largest scales where our covered volume should be sufficient to give the full expected signal. A detailed comparison between the amplitudes of the dipole, quadrupole and octopole of the RS map and of the CMB, as observed in the 3-years WMAP data (Hinshaw et al. 2006), is given in Table 1. It is curious to notice the similar alignment of the quadrupole and octopole components of the RS and of the CMB, see Fig. 3. But in any case, the RS effect from the local universe is far from being a relevant contribution to the CMB anisotropies because of its small amplitude, which corresponds only to a contribution at the percent level. To explain the observed CMB quadrupole and octopole features, photons traversing the local cosmic structures would need to feel a five/ten times larger gravitational redshift than would be expected in a standard scenario with dark matter and Newtonian gravity.
Table 1: Amplitude of the multipoles l=1, l=2 and l=3 of the RS effect as derived in our simulation, and of the CMB as measured by the 3 year WMAP data (Hinshaw et al. 2006).
We conclude that in Newtonian gravity the RS effect due to the local
universe does not explain the deviations of the CMB from the expected
primary anisotropies predicted by the concordance
-CDM model,
i.e. the non-Gaussian features and the quadrupole-octopole
alignment. However, we also found that the RS amplitude lies above the
instrumental noise level for low l, and thus it may be possible to
determine an upper limit for it, even if very weak, thanks to the
present or upcoming full sky CMB experiments. On one hand a detection
would help to understand the local cosmological structures and the
details of their formation. On the other hand, if it was impossible to
achieve a detection with an optimally designed filter then this would
effectively ensure that the RS effect from the local universe
constitutes a negligible foreground for any kind of data analysis of
the CMB experiments. In the next section, we therefore explore the
feasibility of measuring the RS signal from CMB data by using a linear
matched filter defined on the sphere.
![]() |
Figure 3: Comparison between the quadrupole and the octopole of the CMB as measured by WMAP ( top panels) and of the RS effect from the local universe ( bottom panels). |
| Open with DEXTER | |
We wish to construct a linear matched filter allowing the RS effect from the local universe to be extracted from millimetric observations of the CMB. We want the filter to suppress, as well as possible, the primary anisotropies of the CMB as well as the instrumental noise. In this work we ignore other possible sources of noise such us the residuals of the galactic foreground separation. Because of the significant level of such contaminations of the CMB primary anisotropies we only expect to obtain an upper limit constraint.
The filter used in this work is based on a template for the expected signal and on the power spectrum of the noise. It was proposed by Haehnelt & Tegmark (1996) in a flat sky approximation to estimate the peculiar velocities of galaxy clusters through their kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Subsequently, it has also been proposed as a tool to estimate the mass of galaxy clusters through weak lensing of the CMB (Seljak & Zaldarriaga 2000) and for cluster detection in optical weak lensing surveys (Maturi et al. 2005). An extension of the filter to the sphere was first introduced by Schaefer et al. (2004), assuming axially symmetric models for the expected signal.
We generalize the filter on the sphere for any non-axially symmetric
model which, like the RS effect, has a known orientation and
position. Thus, unlike in Schaefer et al. 2004, where the position of
the signal is not previously known, we do not need to probe all
orientations by performing a time consuming full sky convolution. We
model the measured data
,
which contains a signal
contaminated by some noise
,
by
![]() |
(5) |
For convenience, all quantities are derived in the harmonic space. We
wish to construct a linear filter
which yields an
estimate
for the amplitude A of the signal, viz.
The estimate is required to be unbiased and optimal, i.e. the quantity
![]() |
(7) |
Before applying our procedure to real data, we have tested the
described filter on mock data where we combined the full sky RS map
(see Sect. 2.2) from our simulation of the local
universe with a realization of the primary CMB fluctuations computed
with CMBEASY (Doran 2003) for a standard WMAP-3 cosmology.
The resulting map was then degraded by adding an instrumental noise
with the power spectrum
The resulting map is finally analyzed with the filter described in
Sect. 4.1. For the filter template
we use the
same RS map which was also included in the simulated
observations. This is a strong simplification, but here we only aim
at testing the performance of the filter when all the conditions for
its application are optimally satisfied.
The results are as follows:
| Expected signal | : |
|
| WMAP (simulation) | : |
|
| Planck (simulation) | : |
|
Finally, we apply the filter, as previously described, to the 3-years
ILC map of the WMAP experiment (Hinshaw et al. 2006). In this case, since the
ILC map is convolved with a Gaussian kernel with
,
we convolved the template
in the same way before the filter
derivation. This convolution of the template has the implicit
advantage of suppressing small features in the RS template which may
not be present in the structures of the real universe. The resulting
filter is shown in Fig. 4.
To estimate the variance of the measurement, we refrain from using Eq. (8) because it supposes that the template is identical to the expected signal and thus Eq. (8) would yield a lower limit for the noise amplitude. We rather estimate the noise level by applying the filter many times with the RS template randomly rotated on the unit sphere. While the mean of these randomized measurements should be consistent with zero because the rotated templates do not match the expected signal, the dispersion around zero provides a good estimate of the noise level. We obtain
which implies an upper limit for the amplitude of the RS effect in the
actual CMB data of
.
This is not very
restrictive compared to the expected signal strength of
.
![]() |
Figure 4: Filter function used to estimate the upper limit for the maximum amplitude of the RS effect produced by the local universe. |
| Open with DEXTER | |
We estimated a realistic map of the Rees-Sciama effect causd by the
evolution of the gravitational potential in the local universe within
a sphere with a radius of
centered on our Galaxy. To
this end we used a high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation whose
initial conditions were constrained to reproduce the density and
velocity fields inferred from the IRAS 1.2-Jy all-sky galaxy redshift
survey.
We estimated a minimum/maximum amplitude of the local RS effect of
,
which is a factor of 10 larger
than the
predicted by Cooray & Seto (2005). The power
spectrum of the RS signal lies above the instrumental noise of WMAP
and Planck for low multipoles but is always well below the CMB primary
anisotropies. Interestingly, the RS signal's quadrupole and octopole
moments are well aligned with those of the CMB primary
fluctuations. However, the small amplitudes of these RS multipoles are
not sufficient to explain the quadrupole-octopole alignment observed
by COBE and WMAP in the CMB.
In addition, we attempted to measure the RS effect on large scales in
mock CMB observations as well as in real data using a matched filter
technique. We found that it is only possible to place a rather weak
upper limit for its amplitude even under optimistic assumptions. In
analyzing the 3-years ILC map of WMAP (Hinshaw et al. 2006) this upper limit
turned out be
,
which is not very
restrictive compared with the expected signal of
.