Cosmology

Abstract:

We use interferometric 12CO(1-0) observations to compare and contrast the extent, surface brightness profiles and kinematics of the molecular gas in CO-rich ATLAS3D early-type galaxies (ETGs) and spiral galaxies. We find that the molecular gas extent is smaller in absolute terms in ETGs than in late-type galaxies, but that the size distributions are similar once scaled by the galaxies optical/stellar characteristic scalelengths. Amongst ETGs, we find that the extent of the gas is independent of its kinematic misalignment (with respect to the stars), but does depend on the environment, with Virgo cluster ETGs having less extended molecular gas reservoirs, further emphasizing that cluster ETGs follow different evolutionary pathways from those in the field. Approximately half of ETGs have molecular gas surface brightness profiles that follow the stellar light profile. These systems often have relaxed gas out to large radii, suggesting they are unlikely to have had recent merger/accretion events. A third of the sample galaxies show molecular gas surface brightness profiles that fall off slower than the light, and sometimes show a truncation. These galaxies often have a low mass, and eitherhave disturbed molecular gas or are in the Virgo cluster, suggesting that recent mergers, ram pressure stripping and/or the presence of hot gas can compress/truncate the gas. The remaining galaxies have rings, or composite profiles, that we argue can be caused by the effects of bars. We investigated the kinematics of the molecular gas using position-velocity diagrams, and compared the observed kinematics with dynamical model predictions, and the observed stellar and ionized gas velocities. We confirm that the molecular gas reaches beyond the turnover of the circular velocity curve in~70 per cent of our CO-rich ATLAS3D ETGs, validating previous work on the CO Tully-Fisher relation. In general we find that in most galaxies the molecular gas is dynamically cold, and the observed CO rotation matches well model predictions of the circular velocity. In the galaxies with the largest molecular masses, dust obscuration and/or population gradients can cause model predictions of the circular velocity to disagree with observations of the molecular gas rotation; however, these effects are confined to the most star forming systems. Bars and non-equilibrium conditions can also make the gas deviate from circular orbits. In both these cases, one expects the model circular velocity to be higher than the observed CO velocity, in agreement with our observations. Molecular gas is a better direct tracer of the circular velocity than the ionized gas, justifying its use as a kinematic tracer for Tully-Fisher and similar analyses.

Abstract:

Recent evidence for a strong "hard excess" of flux at energies ≳ 20 keV in some Suzaku observations of type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) has motivated an exploratory study of the phenomenon in the local type 1 AGN population. We have selected all type 1 AGNs in the Swift Burst Alert Telescope 58 month catalog and cross-correlated them with the holdings of the Suzaku public archive. We find the hard excess phenomenon to be a ubiquitous property of type 1 AGNs. Taken together, the spectral hardness and equivalent width of Fe Kα emission are consistent with reprocessing by an ensemble of Compton-thick clouds that partially cover the continuum source. In the context of such a model, ∼80% of the sample has a hardness ratio consistent with >50% covering of the continuum by low-ionization, Compton-thick gas. A more detailed study of the three hardest X-ray spectra in our sample reveal a sharp Fe K absorption edge at ∼7 keV in each of them, indicating that blurred reflection is not responsible for the very hard spectral forms. Simple considerations place the distribution of Compton-thick clouds at or within the optical broad-line region. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..

Abstract:

We present a finely binned tomographic weak lensing analysis of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) mitigating contamination to the signal from the presence of intrinsic galaxy alignments via the simultaneous fit of a cosmological model and an intrinsic alignment model. CFHTLenS spans 154 square degrees in five optical bands, with accurate shear and photometric redshifts for a galaxy sample with a median redshift of zm = 0.70. We estimate the 21 sets of cosmic shear correlation functions associated with six redshift bins, each spanning the angular range of 1.5 < θ < 35 arcmin. We combine this CFHTLenS data with auxiliary cosmological probes: the cosmic microwave background with data from WMAP7, baryon acoustic oscillations with data from Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and a prior on the Hubble constant from the Hubble Space Telescope distance ladder. This leads to constraints on the normalization of the matter power spectrum σ8 = 0.799 ± 0.015 and the matter density parameter ωm = 0.271 ± 0.010 for a flat Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology. For a flat wCDM cosmology, we constrain the dark energy equation-of-state parameter w = -1.02 ± 0.09. We also provide constraints for curved ΛCDM and wCDM cosmologies.We find the intrinsic alignment contamination to be galaxy-type dependent with a significant intrinsic alignment signal found for early-type galaxies, in contrast to the late-type galaxy sample for which the intrinsic alignment signal is found to be consistent with zero. © 2013 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.