Rubin-LSST

Abstract:

The challenge of consistent identification of internal structure in galaxies - in particular disc galaxy components like spiral arms, bars, and bulges - has hindered our ability to study the physical impact of such structure across large samples. In this paper we present Galaxy Zoo: 3D (GZ:3D) a crowdsourcing project built on the Zooniverse platform that we used to create spatial pixel (spaxel) maps that identify galaxy centres, foreground stars, galactic bars, and spiral arms for 29 831 galaxies that were potential targets of the MaNGA survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory, part of the fourth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys or SDSS-IV), including nearly all of the 10 010 galaxies ultimately observed. Our crowdsourced visual identification of asymmetric internal structures provides valuable insight on the evolutionary role of non-axisymmetric processes that is otherwise lost when MaNGA data cubes are azimuthally averaged. We present the publicly available GZ:3D catalogue alongside validation tests and example use cases. These data may in the future provide a useful training set for automated identification of spiral arm features. As an illustration, we use the spiral masks in a sample of 825 galaxies to measure the enhancement of star formation spatially linked to spiral arms, which we measure to be a factor of three over the background disc, and how this enhancement increases with radius.

Abstract:

We study the radio spectral properties of 2094 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) by combining our early science data from the MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) survey with VLA, GMRT radio data, and rich ancillary data in the COSMOS field. These SFGs are selected at VLA 3 GHz, and their flux densities from MeerKAT 1.3 GHz and GMRT 325 MHz imaging data are extracted using the ‘superdeblending’ technique. The median radio spectral index is α3GHz1.3GHz=−0.80±0.01 without significant variation across the rest-frame frequencies ∼1.3–10 GHz, indicating radio spectra dominated by synchrotron radiation. On average, the radio spectrum at observer-frame 1.3–3 GHz slightly steepens with increasing stellar mass with a linear fitted slope of β = −0.08 ± 0.01, which could be explained by age-related synchrotron losses. Due to the sensitivity of GMRT 325 MHz data, we apply a further flux density cut at 3 GHz (⁠S3GHz≥50μJy) and obtain a sample of 166 SFGs with measured flux densities at 325 MHz, 1.3 GHz, and 3 GHz. On average, the radio spectrum of SFGs flattens at low frequency with the median spectral indices of α1.3GHz325MHz=−0.59+0.02−0.03 and α3.0GHz1.3GHz=−0.74+0.01−0.02⁠. At low frequency, our stacking analyses show that the radio spectrum also slightly steepens with increasing stellar mass. By comparing the far-infrared-radio correlations of SFGs based on different radio spectral indices, we find that adopting α3GHz1.3GHz for k-corrections will significantly underestimate the infrared-to-radio luminosity ratio (qIR) for >17 per cent of the SFGs with measured flux density at the three radio frequencies in our sample, because their radio spectra are significantly flatter at low frequency (0.33–1.3 GHz).