Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

© 2018 The Author(s). Future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and energy spectrum will be limited by our understanding and modelling of foregrounds. Not only does more information need to be gathered and combined, but also novel approaches for the modelling of foregrounds, commensurate with the vast improvements in sensitivity, have to be explored. Here, we study the inevitable effects of spatial averaging on the spectral shapes of typical foreground components, introducing a moment approach, which naturally extends the list of foreground parameters that have to be determined through measurements or constrained by theoretical models. Foregrounds are thought of as a superposition of individual emitting volume elements along the line of sight and across the sky, which then are observed through an instrumental beam. The beam and line-of-sight averages are inevitable. Instead of assuming a specific model for the distributions of physical parameters, our method identifies natural new spectral shapes for each foreground component that can be used to extract parameter moments (e.g. mean, dispersion, cross terms, etc.). The method is illustrated for the superposition of power laws, free-free spectra, grey-body and modified blackbody spectra, but can be applied to more complicated fundamental spectral energy distributions. Here, we focus on intensity signals but the method can be extended to the case of polarized emission. The averaging process automatically produces scale-dependent spectral shapes and the moment method can be used to propagate the required information across scales in power spectrum estimates. The approach is not limited to applications to CMB foregrounds, but could also be useful for the modelling of X-ray emission in clusters of galaxies.

Abstract:

In this paper we study the morphological properties of spiral galaxies, including measurements of spiral arm number and pitch angle. Using Galaxy Zoo 2, a stellar mass-complete sample of 6,222 SDSS spiral galaxies is selected. We use the machine vision algorithm SpArcFiRe to identify spiral arm features and measure their associated geometries. A support vector machine classifier is employed to identify reliable spiral features, with which we are able to estimate pitch angles for half of our sample. We use these machine measurements to calibrate visual estimates of arm tightness, and hence estimate pitch angles for our entire sample. The properties of spiral arms are compared with respect to various galaxy properties. The star formation properties of galaxies vary significantly with arm number, but not pitch angle. We find that galaxies hosting strong bars have spiral arms substantially (4-6) looser than unbarred galaxies. Accounting for this, spiral arms associated with many-arm structures are looser (by 2) than those in two-arm galaxies. In contrast to this average trend, galaxies with greater bulge-to-total stellar mass ratios display both fewer and looser spiral arms. This effect is primarily driven by the galaxy disc, such that galaxies with more massive discs contain more spiral arms with tighter pitch angles. This implies that galaxy central mass concentration is not the dominant cause of pitch angle and arm number variations between galaxies, which in turn suggests that not all spiral arms are governed by classical density waves or modal theories.

Abstract:

Imaging surveys of galaxies will have a high number density and angular resolution yet a poor redshift precision. Intensity maps of neutral hydrogen will have accurate redshift resolution yet will not resolve individual sources. Using this complementarity, we show how the clustering redshifts approach proposed for spectroscopic surveys can also be used in combination with intensity mapping observations to calibrate the redshift distribution of galaxies in an imaging survey and, as a result, reduce uncertainties in photometric-redshift measurements. We show how the intensity mapping surveys to be carried out with the MeerKAT, HIRAX and SKA instruments can improve photometric-redshift uncertainties to well below the requirements of DES and LSST. The effectiveness of this method as a function of instrumental parameters, foreground subtraction and other potential systematic errors is discussed in detail.