Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

We present a population study of the star formation history of 1244 Type 2 AGN host galaxies, compared to 6107 inactive galaxies. A Bayesian method is used to determine individual galaxy star formation histories, which are then collated to visualise the distribution for quenching and quenched galaxies within each population. We find evidence for some of the Type 2 AGN host galaxies having undergone a rapid drop in their star formation rate within the last 2 Gyr. AGN feedback is therefore important at least for this population of galaxies. This result is not seen for the quenching and quenched inactive galaxies whose star formation histories are dominated by the effects of downsizing at earlier epochs, a secondary effect for the AGN host galaxies. We show that histories of rapid quenching cannot account fully for the quenching of all the star formation in a galaxy's lifetime across the population of quenched AGN host galaxies, and that histories of slower quenching, attributed to secular (non-violent) evolution, are also key in their evolution. This is in agreement with recent results showing both merger-driven and non-merger processes are contributing to the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. The availability of gas in the reservoirs of a galaxy, and its ability to be replenished, appear to be the key drivers behind this co-evolution.

Abstract:

The high sensitivity of the new generation of radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will allow cosmological weak lensing measurements at radio wavelengths that are competitive with optical surveys. We present an adaptation to radio data of lensfit, a method for galaxy shape measurement originally developed and used for optical weak lensing surveys. This likelihood method uses an analytical galaxy model and makes a Bayesian marginalization of the likelihood over uninteresting parameters. It has the feature of working directly in the visibility domain, which is the natural approach to adopt with radio interferometer data, avoiding systematics introduced by the imaging process. As a proof of concept, we provide results for visibility simulations of individual galaxies with flux density S ≥ 10 μJy at the phase centre of the proposed SKA1-MID baseline configuration, adopting 12 frequency channels in the band 950–1190 MHz. Weak lensing shear measurements from a population of galaxies with realistic flux and scalelength distributions are obtained after natural gridding of the raw visibilities. Shear measurements are expected to be affected by ‘noise bias’: we estimate the bias in the method as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We obtain additive and multiplicative bias values that are comparable to SKA1 requirements for SNR > 18 and SNR > 30, respectively. The multiplicative bias for SNR >10 is comparable to that found in ground-based optical surveys such as CFHTLenS, and we anticipate that similar shear measurement calibration strategies to those used for optical surveys may be used to good effect in the analysis of SKA radio interferometer data.