cosmology - Where is radiation density in the Planck 2013 results? - Phy... file:///C:/Users/User/Desktop/cosmology - Where is radiation density in t...

_
Physics Stack Exchange is a question Here's how it works:
and answer site for active researchers,
academics and students of physics. Join
them; it only takes a minute:

Sign up Anybody can ask Anybody can The best answers are voted
a question answer up and rise to the top

Where is radiation density in the Planck 2013 results?

I've been looking at the Planck 2013 cosmological parameters paper, trying to update my toy cosmology simulator with the most recent data.
Most of the interesting values such as , , and can be found in Table 2 on page 12, but the one thing I didn't find was an estimate of
the energy density of radiation. Can this be derived from some other parameters in these data?

cosmology radiation cosmic-microwave-background

edited Jan 18 '14 at 12:55 asked Jan 18 '14 at 6:06

Pulsar Nathan Reed
9,410 2 20 52 1,704 7 19

It'd be useful if you gave us the link for your simulator. I'd love to enjoy it ;-) Waffle's Crazy Peanut Jan 19 '14 at
3:20

1 @Waffle'sCrazyPeanut I wrote a blog post about it awhile back, and the code (in Python) is linked from there. It's
pretty simple. Nathan Reed Jan 19 '14 at 4:11

2 Answers

The radiation density has two components: the present-day photon density and the
neutrino density . The photon density as a function of frequency can be derived directly from
the CMB: the photon number density follows the Planck law

with the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and the current CMB temperature. The photon
energy density is then

where

is the radiation energy constant. With , we get

The neutrino density is related to the photon density: in Eq. (1) on page 5 in the paper, you see
that

This relation can be derived from physics in the early universe, when neutrinos and photons
were in thermal equilibrium. So

and the total present-day radiation density is

We can also express this relative to the present-day critical density

1 von 1 29.10.2017, 13:30