Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2021-11-30 11:30 to 2021-12-03 12:30 | Next meeting is Tuesday Apr 22nd, 10:30 am.
We present new HI interferometric observations of the gas-rich ultra-diffuse galaxy AGC 114905, which previous work, based on low-resolution data, identified as an outlier of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation. The new observations, at a spatial resolution $\sim 2.5$ times higher than before, reveal a regular HI disc rotating at about 23 km/s. Our kinematic parameters, recovered with a robust 3D kinematic modelling fitting technique, show that the flat part of the rotation curve is reached. Intriguingly, the rotation curve can be explained almost entirely by the baryonic mass distribution alone. We show that a standard cold dark matter halo that follows the concentration-halo mass relation fails to reproduce the amplitude of the rotation curve by a large margin. Only a halo with an extremely (and arguably unfeasible) low concentration reaches agreement with the data. We also find that the rotation curve of AGC 114905 deviates strongly from the predictions of Modified Newtonian dynamics. The inclination of the galaxy, which is measured independently from our modelling, remains the largest uncertainty in our analysis, but the associated errors are not large enough to reconcile the galaxy with the expectations of cold dark matter or Modified Newtonian dynamics.
Gravitational waves (GW) can be employed as standard sirens that will soon measure the Hubble constant with sufficient precision to weigh in on the $\sim 5\sigma$ Hubble tension. Most GW sources will have no identified electromagnetic counterpart, leading to uncertainty in the redshift of the source, and in turn a degeneracy between host galaxy distance, redshift, and $H_0$. In the case where no electromagnetic counterparts are identified, it has been proposed that a statistical canvassing of candidate GW hosts, found in a large galaxy survey for example, can be used to accurately constrain the Hubble constant. We study and simulate this "galaxy voting" method to compute $H_0$. We find that the Hubble constant posterior is in general biased relative to the true value even when making optimistic assumptions about the statistical properties of the sample. This bias is caused by the fundamental degeneracy between redshift and $H_0$, and is effectively irreducible without accurate information about the redshift distribution from which the GW sources come.