Experimental cosmology: The early universe after COBE

摘要

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Our simulations of the Cold Dark Matter model (CDM) on parallel supercomputers have shown that the galaxy velocity dispersion at small scales is consistent with results obtained from the CfA sky survey. This is significant, since velocity dispersion limits had been previously used to rule out the model. Similarly, we have shown that the redshift-space power spectrum (also used to rule out CDM) does not provide an unambiguous constraint at small scales, and is consistent with the power spectrum measured in the IRAS galaxy catalog. The comparison between the numerical experiments and the observations is not as straightforward as was usually assumed, both because of a significant scatter of velocity dispersions between different observation-sized samples, and because of the importance of clusters.