Galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract:

The intrinsic correlations of galaxy shapes and orientations across the large-scale structure of the Universe are a known contaminant to weak gravitational lensing. They are known to be dependent on galaxy properties, such as their mass and morphologies. The complex interplay between alignments and the physical processes that drive galaxy evolution remains vastly unexplored. We assess the sensitivity of intrinsic alignments (shapes and angular momenta) to active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback by comparing galaxy alignment in twin runs of the cosmological hydrodynamical Horizon simulation, which do and do not include AGN feedback, respectively. We measure intrinsic alignments in three dimensions and in projection at z = 0 and z = 1. We find that the projected alignment signal of all galaxies with resolved shapes with respect to the density field in the simulation is robust to AGN feedback, thus giving similar predictions for contamination to weak lensing. The relative alignment of galaxy shapes around galaxy positions is however significantly impacted, especially when considering high-mass ellipsoids. Using a sample of galaxy ‘twins’ across simulations, we determine that AGN changes both the galaxy selection and their actual alignments. Finally, we measure the alignments of angular momenta of galaxies with their nearest filament. Overall, these are more significant in the presence of AGN as a result of the higher abundance of massive pressure-supported galaxies.

Abstract:

We present the radio luminosity function (RLF) of optically selected quasars below 1 mJy, constructed by applying a Bayesian-fitting stacking technique to objects well below the nominal radio flux density limit. We test the technique using simulated data, confirming that we can reconstruct the RLF over three orders of magnitude below the typical 5σ detection threshold. We apply our method to 1.4-GHz flux densities from the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters (FIRST) survey, extracted at the positions of optical quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over seven redshift bins up to z = 2.15, and measure the RLF down to two orders of magnitude below the FIRST detection threshold. In the lowest redshift bin (0.2 < z < 0.45), we find that our measured RLF agrees well with deeper data from the literature. The RLF for the radio-loud quasars flattens below log10[L1.4/WHz−1]≈25.5 and becomes steeper again below log10[L1.4/WHz−1]≈24.8⁠, where radio-quiet quasars start to emerge. The radio luminosity where radio-quiet quasars emerge coincides with the luminosity where star-forming galaxies are expected to start dominating the radio source counts. This implies that there could be a significant contribution from star formation in the host galaxies, but additional data are required to investigate this further. The higher redshift bins show a similar behaviour to the lowest z bin, implying that the same physical process may be responsible.