Measuring light echoes in NGC 4051
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 467:4 (2017) 3924-3933
Abstract:
Five archived X-ray observations of NGC 4051, taken using the NuSTAR observatory, have been analysed, revealing lags between flux variations in bands covering a wide range of X-ray photon energy. In all pairs of bands compared, the harder band consistently lags the softer band by at least 1000s, at temporal frequencies ~5E-5 Hz. In addition, soft-band lags up to 400s are measured at frequencies ~2E-4 Hz. Light echos from an excess of soft band emission in the inner accretion disk cannot explain the lags in these data, as they are seen in cross-correlations with energy bands where the softer band is expected to have no contribution from reflection. The basic properties of the time delays have been parameterised by fitting a top hat response function that varies with photon energy, taking fully into account the covariance between measured time lag values. The low-frequency hard-band lags and the transition to soft-band lags are consistent with time lags arising as reverberation delays from circumnuclear scattering of X-rays, although greater model complexity is required to explain the entire spectrum of lags. The scattered fraction increases with increasing photon energy as expected, and the scattered fraction is high, indicating the reprocessor to have a global covering fraction ~50% around the continuum source. Circumnuclear material, possibly associated with a disk wind at a few hundred gravitational radii from the primary X-ray source, may provide suitable reprocessing.Galaxy-halo alignments in the Horizon-AGN cosmological hydrodynamical simulation
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (2017)
Abstract:
Intrinsic alignments of galaxies are a significant astrophysical systematic affecting cosmological constraints from weak gravitational lensing. Obtaining numerical predictions from hydrodynamical simulations of expected survey volumes is expensive, and a cheaper alternative relies on populating large dark matter-only simulations with accurate models of alignments calibrated on smaller hydrodynamical runs. This requires connecting the shapes and orientations of galaxies to those of dark matter halos and to the large-scale structure. In this paper, we characterise galaxy-halo alignments in the Horizon-AGN cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We compare the shapes and orientations of galaxies in the redshift range $0Lensing is low: Cosmology, galaxy formation, or new physics?
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 467:3 (2017) 3024-3047
Abstract:
We present high signal-to-noise galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements of the BOSS CMASS sample using 250 square degrees of weak lensing data from CFHTLenS and CS82. We compare this signal with predictions from mock catalogs trained to match observables including the stellar mass function and the projected and two dimensional clustering of CMASS. We show that the clustering of CMASS, together with standard models of the galaxy-halo connection, robustly predicts a lensing signal that is 20-40% larger than observed. Detailed tests show that our results are robust to a variety of systematic effects. Lowering the value of $S_{\rm 8}=\sigma_{\rm 8} \sqrt{\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3}$ compared to Planck2015 reconciles the lensing with clustering. However, given the scale of our measurement ($r<10$ $h^{-1}$ Mpc), other effects may also be at play and need to be taken into consideration. We explore the impact of baryon physics, assembly bias, massive neutrinos, and modifications to general relativity on $\Delta\Sigma$ and show that several of these effects may be non-negligible given the precision of our measurement. Disentangling cosmological effects from the details of the galaxy-halo connection, the effects of baryons, and massive neutrinos, is the next challenge facing joint lensing and clustering analyses. This is especially true in the context of large galaxy samples from Baryon Acoustic Oscillation surveys with precise measurements but complex selection functions.GMRT 610-MHz observations of the faint radio source population – and what these tell us about the higher radio-frequency sky
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 464:3 (2017) 3357-3368
Abstract:
We present 610-MHz Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope observations of 0.84 deg2 of the AMI001 field (centred on 00h23m10s, +31°53΄) with an rms noise of 18 μJy beam−1 in the centre of the field. A total of 955 sources are detected, and 814 are included in the source count analysis. The source counts from these observations are consistent with previous work. We have used these data to study the spectral index distribution of a sample of sources selected at 15.7 GHz from the recent deep extension to the Tenth Cambridge (10C) survey. The median spectral index, α, (where S ∝ ν−α) between 0.08CFHTLenS and RCSLenS: testing photometric redshift distributions using angular cross-correlations with spectroscopic galaxy surveys
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 463:4 (2016) 3737-3754