Dipartimento di Fisica

Descrizione del progetto

The standard cosmological model, so successful in describing an impressively large number of observations, is characterized by the presence of unseen components that dominate the mass-energy budget of the Universe.
Two of these, the Dark Matter [DM] and the missing baryons [MB] are key ingredients to understand the build-up of cosmic structures, their thermal and chemical history and their spatial distribution in the nearby Universe.
Despite of their importance, the intrinsic properties of these components, i.e. the fundamental nature of DM and the physical status of the MB, are still unknown.
Building on the results of our previous, funded program we aim at inferring these properties using the same cross-correlation techniques that proved so successful in our original proposal.
To this aim we will cross-correlate 3D distributions of objects from large surveys with X-ray and g-ray maps to search for unambiguous electromagnetic signals from these two dark components.

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