Cosmology

Abstract:

The interactions between radio-loud AGN and their environments play an important role in galaxy and cluster evolution. Recent work has demonstrated fundamental differences between High and Low Excitation Radio Galaxies (HERGs and LERGs), and shown that they may have different relationships with their environments. In the Chandra Large Project ERA (Environments of Radio-loud AGN), we made the first systematic X-ray environmental study of the cluster environments of radio galaxies at a single epoch (z~0.5), and found tentative evidence for a correlation between radio luminosity and cluster X-ray luminosity. We also found that this relationship appeared to be driven by the LERG sub-population (Ineson et al. 2013). We have now repeated the analysis with a low redshift sample (z~0.1), and found strong correlations between radio luminosity and environment richness and between radio luminosity and central density for the LERGs but not for the HERGs. These results are consistent with models in which the HERGs are fuelled from accretion discs maintained from local reservoirs of gas, while LERGs are fuelled more directly by gas ingested from the intra-cluster medium. Comparing the samples, we found that although the maximum environment richness of the HERG environments is similar in both samples, there are poorer HERG environments in the z~0.1 sample than in the z~0.5 sample. We have therefore tentative evidence of evolution of the HERG environments. We found no differences between the LERG sub-samples for the two epochs, as would be expected if radio and cluster luminosity are related.

Abstract:

We study the 850um emission in X-ray selected AGN in the 2 sq-deg COSMOS field using new data from the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey. We find 19 850um bright X-ray AGN in a high-sensitivity region covering 0.89 sq-deg with flux densities of S850=4-10 mJy. The 19 AGN span the full range in redshift and hard X-ray luminosity covered by the sample - 0.71 X-ray AGN - S850=0.71+/-0.08mJy. We explore trends in the stacked 850um flux densities with redshift, finding no evolution in the average cold dust emission over the redshift range probed. For Type 1 AGN, there is no significant correlation between the stacked 850um flux and hard X-ray luminosity. However, in Type 2 AGN the stacked submm flux is a factor of 2 higher at high luminosities. When averaging over all X-ray luminosities, no significant differences are found in the stacked submm fluxes of Type 1 and Type 2 AGN as well as AGN separated on the basis of X-ray hardness ratios and optical-to-infrared colours. However, at log10(LX) >44.4, dependences in average submm flux on the optical-to-infrared colours become more pronounced. We argue that these high luminosity AGN represent a transition from a secular to a merger-driven evolutionary phase where the star formation rates and accretion luminosities are more tightly coupled. Stacked AGN 850um fluxes are compared to the stacked fluxes of a mass-matched sample of K-band selected non-AGN galaxies. We find that at 10.5

Abstract:

© 2015 The Authors. Galaxy shapes are subject to distortions due to the tidal field of the Universe. The crosscorrelation of galaxy lensing with the lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) cannot easily be separated from the cross-correlation of galaxy intrinsic shapes with CMB lensing. Previous work suggested that the intrinsic alignment contamination can be 15 per cent of this cross-spectrum for the CFHT Stripe 82 (CS82) and Atacama Cosmology Telescope surveys. Here we re-examine these estimates using up-to-date observational constraints of intrinsic alignments at a redshift more similar to that of CS82 galaxies. We find an ≈ 10 per cent contamination of the cross-spectrum from red galaxies, with ≈ 3 per cent uncertainty due to uncertainties in the redshift distribution of source galaxies and the modelling of the spectral energy distribution. Blue galaxies are consistent with being unaligned, but could contaminate the cross-spectrum by an additional 9.5 per cent within current 95 per cent confidence levels. While our fiducial estimate of alignment contamination is similar to previous work, our work suggests that the relevance of alignments for CMB lensing-galaxy lensing cross-correlation remains largely unconstrained. Little information is currently available about alignments at z > 1.2. We consider the upper limiting case where all z > 1.2 galaxies are aligned with the same strength as low-redshift luminous red galaxies, finding as much as ≈ 60 per cent contamination.