Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

Low-mass galaxies are thought to provide the bulk of the ionizing radiation necessary to reionize the Universe. The amount of photons escaping the galaxies is poorly constrained theoretically, and difficult to measure observationally. Yet it is an essential parameter of reionization models.We study in detail how ionizing radiation can leak from high-redshift galaxies. For this purpose, we use a series of high-resolution radiation hydrodynamics simulations, zooming on three dwarf galaxies in a cosmological context. We find that the energy and momentum input from the supernova explosions has a pivotal role in regulating the escape fraction by disrupting dense star-forming clumps, and clearing sightlines in the halo. In the absence of supernovae, photons are absorbed very locally, within the birth clouds of massive stars. We follow the time evolution of the escape fraction and find that it can vary by more than six orders of magnitude. This explains the large scatter in the value of the escape fraction found by previous studies. This fast variability also impacts the observability of the sources of reionization: a survey even as deep as M 1500 = -14 would miss about half of the underlying population of Lyman-continuum emitters.

Abstract:

We use multi-wavelength SDSS images and Galaxy Zoo morphologies to identify a sample of $\sim$$270$ late-type galaxies with an off-centre bar. We measure offsets in the range 0.2-2.5 kpc between the photometric centres of the stellar disc and stellar bar. The measured offsets correlate with global asymmetries of the galaxies, with those with largest offsets showing higher lopsidedness. These findings are in good agreement with predictions from simulations of dwarf-dwarf tidal interactions producing off-centre bars. We find that the majority of galaxies with off-centre bars are of Magellanic type, with a median mass of $10^{9.6} M_{\odot}$, and 91% of them having $M_{\star}<3\times10^{10} M_{\odot}$, the characteristic mass at which galaxies start having higher central concentrations attributed to the presence of bulges. We conduct a search for companions to test the hypothesis of tidal interactions, but find that a similar fraction of galaxies with offset bars have companions within 100 kpc as galaxies with centred bars. Although this may be due to the incompleteness of the SDSS spectroscopic survey at the faint end, alternative scenarios that give rise to offset bars such as interactions with dark companions or the effect of lopsided halo potentials should be considered. Future observations are needed to confirm possible low mass companion candidates and to determine the shape of the dark matter halo, in order to find the explanation for the off-centre bars in these galaxies.

Abstract:

We test extensions to the standard cosmological model with weak gravitational lensing tomography using 450 deg$^2$ of imaging data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). In these extended cosmologies, which include massive neutrinos, nonzero curvature, evolving dark energy, modified gravity, and running of the scalar spectral index, we also examine the discordance between KiDS and cosmic microwave background measurements from Planck. The discordance between the two datasets is largely unaffected by a more conservative treatment of the lensing systematics and the removal of angular scales most sensitive to nonlinear physics. The only extended cosmology that simultaneously alleviates the discordance with Planck and is at least moderately favored by the data includes evolving dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state (in the form of the $w_0-w_a$ parameterization). In this model, the respective $S_8 = \sigma_8 \sqrt{\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3}$ constraints agree at the $1\sigma$ level, and there is `substantial concordance' between the KiDS and Planck datasets when accounting for the full parameter space. Moreover, the Planck constraint on the Hubble constant is wider than in LCDM and in agreement with the Riess et al. (2016) direct measurement of $H_0$. The dark energy model is moderately favored as compared to LCDM when combining the KiDS and Planck measurements, and remains moderately favored after including an informative prior on the Hubble constant. In both of these scenarios, the dark energy parameters are discrepant with a cosmological constant at the $3\sigma$ level. Moreover, KiDS constrains the sum of neutrino masses to 4.0 eV (95% CL), finds no preference for time or scale dependent modifications to the metric potentials, and is consistent with flatness and no running of the spectral index. The analysis code is publicly available at https://github.com/sjoudaki/kids450

Abstract:

Does the environment of a galaxy directly influence the quenching history of a galaxy? Here we investigate the detailed morphological structures and star formation histories of a sample of SDSS group galaxies with both classifications from Galaxy Zoo 2 and NUV detections in GALEX. We use the optical and NUV colours to infer the quenching time and rate describing a simple exponentially declining SFH for each galaxy, along with a control sample of field galaxies. We find that the time since quenching and the rate of quenching do not correlate with the relative velocity of a satellite but are correlated with the group potential. This quenching occurs within an average quenching timescale of ∼2.5 Gyr from star forming to complete quiescence, during an average infall time (from ∼10R200 to 0.01R200) of ∼2.6 Gyr. Our results suggest that the environment does play a direct role in galaxy quenching through quenching mechanisms which are correlated with the group potential, such as harassment, interactions or starvation. Environmental quenching mechanisms which are correlated with satellite velocity, such as ram pressure stripping, are not the main cause of quenching in the group environment. We find that no single mechanism dominates over another, except in the most extreme environments or masses. Instead an interplay of mergers, mass & morphological quenching and environment driven quenching mechanisms dependent on the group potential drive galaxy evolution in groups.