Cosmology

Abstract:

According to cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, baryonic matter constitutes about 5% of the mass-energy density of the universe. A significant population of these baryons, for a long time referred to as “missing”, resides in a low density, warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) outside galaxy clusters, tracing the “cosmic web”, a network of large scale dark matter filaments. Various studies have detected this inter-cluster gas, both by stacking and by observing individual filaments in compact, massive systems. In this paper, we study short filaments (< 10 Mpc) connecting massive clusters (〈M 500〉 ≈ 3 × 1014 M⊙) detected by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) using the scattering of CMB light off the ionised gas, a phenomenon known as the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect. The first part of this work is a search for suitable candidates for high resolution follow-up tSZ observations. We identify four cluster pairs with an intercluster signal above the noise floor (S/N > 2), including two with a tentative > 2σ statistical significance for an intercluster bridge from the ACT data alone. In the second part of this work, starting from the same cluster sample, we directly stack on ∼100 cluster pairs and observe an excess SZ signal between the stacked clusters of y = (7.2+2.3 -2.5) × 10-7 with a significance of 3.3σ. It is the first tSZ measurement of hot gas between clusters in this range of masses at moderate redshift (〈z〉 ≈ 0.5). We compare this to the signal from simulated cluster pairs with similar redshifts and separations in the THE300 and MAGNETICUM Pathfinder cosmological simulations and find broad consistency. Additionally, we show that our measurement is consistent with scaling relations between filament parameters and mass of the embedded halos identified in simulations.

Abstract:

Abstract In this work we study a robust, Ks-band complete, spectroscopically-confirmed sample of 104 unobscured (Type-1) quasars within the COSMOS and XMM-LSS fields of the MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) Survey, at 0.60 < zspec < 3.41. The quasars are selected via gJKs colour-space and, with 1.3-GHz flux-densities reaching rms ≈ 3.0 μ Jy beam−1, we find a radio-loudness fraction of 5percnt. Thanks to the deep, multiwavelength datasets that are available over these fields, the properties of radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars can be studied in a statistically-robust way, with the emphasis of this work being on the active-galactic-nuclei (AGN)-related and star-formation-related contributions to the total radio emission. We employ multiple star-formation-rate estimates for the analysis so that our results can be compared more-easily with others in the literature, and find that the fraction of sources that have their radio emission dominated by the AGN crucially depends on the SFR estimate that is derived from the radio luminosity. When redshift dependence is not taken into account, a larger fraction of sources is classed as having their radio emission dominated by the AGN. When redshift dependence is considered, a larger fraction of our sample is tentatively classed as ‘starbursts’. We also find that the fraction of (possible) starbursts increases with redshift, and provide multiple suggestions for this trend.

Abstract:

Early JWST photometric studies discovered a population of UV-faint ( 700 Å) exclude the most metal-poor efficient ionizers and favor (1) more chemically enriched systems with comparable extreme radiation fields and (2) older starbursting systems. In contrast, metallicity degeneracies are reduced in Hα space, enabling the identification of these metal-poor efficient ionizers by their specific star formation rate.

Abstract:

We present a simulation of the time-domain catalog for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Core Community Survey. This simulation, called the Hourglass simulation, uses the most up-to-date spectral energy distribution models and rate measurements for 10 extragalactic time-domain sources. We simulate these models through the design reference Roman Space Telescope survey: four filters per tier, a five-day cadence, over 2 yr, a wide tier of 19 deg2, and a deep tier of 4.2 deg2, with ∼20% of those areas also covered with prism observations. We find that a science-independent Roman time-domain catalog, assuming a signal-to-noise ratio at a max of >5, would have approximately 21,000 Type Ia supernovae, 40,000 core-collapse supernovae, around 70 superluminous supernovae, ∼35 tidal disruption events, three kilonovae, and possibly pair-instability supernovae. In total, Hourglass has over 64,000 transient objects, 11,000,000 photometric observations, and 500,000 spectra. Additionally, Hourglass is a useful data set to train machine learning classification algorithms. We show that SCONE is able to photometrically classify Type Ia supernovae with high precision (∼95%) to a z > 2. Finally, we present the first realistic simulations of non-Type Ia supernovae spectral time series data from Roman’s prism.