A new study led by an international team, including researchers at the Institute of Astronomy, has been selected as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review D -- a distinction awarded to only a small fraction of papers judged by the journal to be particularly important, interesting, and well written.
The research explores how energy released by the growth of black holes and stars (which astronomers call “feedback") reshapes the gas inside galaxies and clusters, leaving tell-tale signatures on the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Using the state-of-the-art FLAMINGO simulations, the team discovered that feedback is most effective in dark matter halos weighing in at a few trillion times the mass of the Sun, where it can drive gas far from galaxies. The most massive clusters, on the other hand, have strong enough gravity to eventually pull this material back in, meaning they are far less affected by these feedback effects. This new finding helps resolve tensions between different observational methods, such as X-ray surveys and measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
The study provides a powerful new framework for interpreting cosmological data and refining future measurements of dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic evolution. It highlights contributions from Professor Hiranya Peiris and Dr Anik Halder, both at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, as part of the international collaboration.
Read the paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/vh8n-9cr2