Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

We present a sample of 341 “little red dots” (LRDs) spanning the redshift range z ∼ 2-11 using data from the CEERS, PRIMER, JADES, UNCOVER, and NGDEEP surveys. Unlike past use of color indices to identify LRDs, we employ continuum slope fitting using shifting bandpasses to sample the same rest-frame emission blueward and redward of the Balmer break. This enables the detection of LRDs over a wider redshift range and with less contamination from galaxies with strong breaks that otherwise lack a rising red continuum. The redshift distribution of our sample increases at z < 8 and then undergoes a rapid decline at z ∼ 4.5, which may tie the emergence of these sources to the inside-out growth that galaxies experience during this epoch. We find that LRDs are ∼1 dex more numerous than X-ray- and UV-selected active galactic nuclei (AGN) at z ∼ 5-7. Within our sample, we have identified the first two X-ray-detected LRDs. An X-ray spectral analysis confirms that these AGN are moderately obscured with log ( N H / cm 2 ) of 23 . 3 − 1.3 + 0.4 and 22.7 2 − 0.16 + 0.13 . Our analysis reveals that reddened AGN emission dominates their rest-optical light, while the rest-UV originates from their host galaxies. We also present NIRSpec observations from the RUBIES survey of 17 LRDs that show broad emission lines consistent with AGN activity. The confirmed AGN fraction of our sample is 71% for sources with F444W < 26.5. In addition, we find three LRDs with blueshifted Balmer absorption features in their spectra, suggesting an outflow of high-density, low-ionization gas from near the central engine of these faint, red AGN.

Abstract:

Automated planetary transit detection has become vital to identify and prioritize candidates for expert analysis and verification given the scale of modern telescopic surveys. Current methods for short-period exoplanet detection work effectively due to periodicity in the transit signals, but a robust approach for detecting single-transit events is lacking. However, volunteer-labeled transits collected by the Planet Hunters TESS (PHT) project now provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate a data-driven approach to long-period exoplanet detection. In this work, we train a 1D convolutional neural network to classify planetary transits using PHT volunteer scores as training data. We find that this model recovers planet candidates (TESS objects of interest; TOIs) at a precision and recall rate exceeding those of volunteers, with a 20% improvement in the area under the precision-recall curve and 10% more TOIs identified in the top 500 predictions on average per sector. Importantly, the model also recovers almost all planet candidates found by volunteers but missed by current automated methods (PHT community TOIs). Finally we retrospectively utilise the model to simulate live deployment in PHT to reprioritize candidates for analysis. We also find that multiple promising planet candidates, originally missed by PHT, would have been found using our approach, showing promise for upcoming real-world deployment.

Abstract:

We study the constraint on f(R) gravity that can be obtained by photometric primary probes of the Euclid mission. Our focus is the dependence of the constraint on the theoretical modelling of the nonlinear matter power spectrum. In the Hu–Sawicki f(R) gravity model, we consider four different predictions for the ratio between the power spectrum in f(R) and that in Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM): a fitting formula, the halo model reaction approach, ReACT, and two emulators based on dark matter only N-body simulations, FORGE and e-Mantis. These predictions are added to the MontePython implementation to predict the angular power spectra for weak lensing (WL), photometric galaxy clustering, and their cross-correlation. By running Markov chain Monte Carlo, we compare constraints on parameters and investigate the bias of the recovered f(R) parameter if the data are created by a different model. For the pessimistic setting of WL, one-dimensional bias for the f(R) parameter, log<inf>10</inf>| f<inf>R</inf><inf>0</inf>|, is found to be 0.5σ when FORGE is used to create the synthetic data with log<inf>10</inf>| f<inf>R</inf><inf>0</inf>| = −5.301 and fitted by e-Mantis. The impact of baryonic physics on WL is studied by using a baryonification emulator, BCemu. For the optimistic setting, the f(R) parameter and two main baryonic parameters are well constrained despite the degeneracies among these parameters. However, the difference in the nonlinear dark matter prediction can be compensated for the adjustment of baryonic parameters, and the one-dimensional marginalised constraint on log<inf>10</inf>| f<inf>R</inf><inf>0</inf>| is biased. This bias can be avoided in the pessimistic setting at the expense of weaker constraints. For the pessimistic setting, using the ΛCDM synthetic data for WL, we obtain the prior-independent upper limit of log<inf>10</inf>| f<inf>R</inf><inf>0</inf>| < −5.6. Finally, we implement a method to include theoretical errors to avoid the bias due to inaccuracies in the nonlinear matter power spectrum prediction.

Abstract:

The dipole anisotropy induced by our peculiar motion in the sky distribution of cosmologically distant sources is an important consistency test of the standard Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker cosmology. In this work, we formalize how to compute the kinematic matter dipole in redshift bins. Apart from the usual terms arising from angular aberration and flux boosting, there is a contribution from the boosting of the redshifts that becomes important when considering a sample selected on observed redshift, leading to nonvanishing correction terms. We discuss examples and provide expressions to incorporate arbitrary redshift selection functions. We also discuss the effect of redshift measurement uncertainties in this context, in particular in upcoming surveys for which we provide estimates of the correction terms. Depending on the shape of a sample’s redshift distribution and on the applied redshift cuts, the correction terms can become substantial, even to the degree that the direction of the dipole is reversed. Lastly, we discuss how cuts on variables correlated with observed redshift, such as color, can induce additional correction terms. Published by the American Physical Society 2025