NEW PHYSICS IN CLUSTERS OF GALAXIES A New Dark Matter Component?

Abstract

The latest cosmological observables analyses seem to converge to a concordant view of the cosmological model: namely the power law Lambda-CDM. The recent WMAP results comfort this new standard model. Nevertheless, some degeneracy in the CMB physics do not allow one to exclude alternative models. A combined analysis with other cosmological observations is thus needed. An example of such work is shown here, focusing on the abundance of local clusters. The latter is a traditional way to derive the amplitude of matter fluctuations, but which suffers from a lack of accurate knowledge of their masses. Here we show that the mass temperature relation can be specified for any cosmological model from consistency arguments, removing most of this uncertainty. This allows to obtain an estimation of the amplitude of matter fluctuations with an accuracy of 5%. Quite remarkably, this amplitude can be also tightly constrained from existing CMB measurements. However, the amplitude inferred in this way in a concordance model (Lambda-CDM) is significantly larger than the value derived from x-ray clusters. Such a discrepancy may reveal the existence of a new dark component in the Universe. It may alternatively reveal a significant depletion of the gas during the formation of clusters. In all cases, an essential element of clusters formation history seems to be missing.