Search Publications
The 1% Concordance Hubble Constant
Larson, D.; Weiland, J. L.; Hinshaw, G. +1 more
The determination of the Hubble constant has been a central goal in observational astrophysics for nearly a hundred years. Extraordinary progress has occurred in recent years on two fronts: the cosmic distance ladder measurements at low redshift and cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements at high redshift. The CMB is used to predict the cur…
Precision Measures of the Primordial Abundance of Deuterium
Pettini, Max; Steidel, Charles C.; Jorgenson, Regina A. +2 more
We report the discovery of deuterium absorption in the very metal-poor ([Fe/H] = -2.88) damped Lyα system at z abs = 3.06726 toward the QSO SDSS J1358+6522. On the basis of 13 resolved D I absorption lines and the damping wings of the H I Lyα transition, we have obtained a new, precise measure of the primordial abundance of deuterium. F…
Cosmological Constraints from Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae Discovered during the First 1.5 yr of the Pan-STARRS1 Survey
Price, P. A.; Berger, E.; Challis, P. +46 more
We present griz P1 light curves of 146 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia 0.03 < z < 0.65) discovered during the first 1.5 yr of the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey. The Pan-STARRS1 natural photometric system is determined by a combination of on-site measurements of the instrument response function and observati…
The Spectrum and Morphology of the Fermi Bubbles
Troja, E.; Caraveo, P. A.; Orlando, E. +132 more
The Fermi bubbles are two large structures in the gamma-ray sky extending to 55° above and below the Galactic center. We analyze 50 months of Fermi Large Area Telescope data between 100 MeV and 500 GeV above 10° in Galactic latitude to derive the spectrum and morphology of the Fermi bubbles. We thoroughly explore the systematic uncertainties that …
BICEP2. II. Experiment and three-year Data Set
Ade, P. A. R.; Bock, J. J.; Hildebrandt, S. R. +49 more
We report on the design and performance of the BICEP2 instrument and on its three-year data set. BICEP2 was designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on angular scales of 1°-5°(l = 40-200), near the expected peak of the B-mode polarization signature of primordial gravitational waves from cosmic inflation. Measur…
Cosmology from Gravitational Lens Time Delays and Planck Data
Treu, T.; Blandford, R. D.; Auger, M. W. +11 more
Under the assumption of a flat ΛCDM cosmology, recent data from the Planck satellite point toward a Hubble constant that is in tension with that measured by gravitational lens time delays and by the local distance ladder. Prosaically, this difference could arise from unknown systematic uncertainties in some of the measurements. More interestingly—…
A Large Catalog of Accurate Distances to Molecular Clouds from PS1 Photometry
Price, P. A.; Rix, H. -W.; Chambers, K. C. +12 more
Distance measurements to molecular clouds are important but are often made separately for each cloud of interest, employing very different data and techniques. We present a large, homogeneous catalog of distances to molecular clouds, most of which are of unprecedented accuracy. We determine distances using optical photometry of stars along lines o…
Systematic Uncertainties Associated with the Cosmological Analysis of the First Pan-STARRS1 Type Ia Supernova Sample
Price, P. A.; Berger, E.; Challis, P. +46 more
We probe the systematic uncertainties from the 113 Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) in the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) sample along with 197 SN Ia from a combination of low-redshift surveys. The companion paper by Rest et al. describes the photometric measurements and cosmological inferences from the PS1 sample. The largest systematic uncertainty stems from the p…
Power Asymmetry in WMAP and Planck Temperature Sky Maps as Measured by a Local Variance Estimator
Banday, A. J.; Eriksen, H. K.; Górski, K. M. +4 more
We revisit the question of hemispherical power asymmetry in the WMAP and Planck temperature sky maps by measuring the local variance over the sky and on disks of various sizes. For the 2013 Planck sky map we find that none of the 1000 available isotropic Planck "Full Focal Plane" simulations have a larger variance asymmetry than that estimated fro…
redMaPPer II: X-Ray and SZ Performance Benchmarks for the SDSS Catalog
Rykoff, E. S.; Rozo, E.
We evaluate the performance of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR8 redMaPPer photometric cluster catalog by comparing it to overlapping X-ray- and Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ)-selected catalogs from the literature. We confirm that the redMaPPer photometric redshifts are nearly unbiased (langΔzrang <= 0.005), have low scatter (σ z ≈ 0.…