21,642 research outputs found
Foreground separation methods for satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background
A maximum entropy method (MEM) is presented for separating the emission due
to different foreground components from simulated satellite observations of the
cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). In particular, the method is
applied to simulated observations by the proposed Planck Surveyor satellite.
The simulations, performed by Bouchet and Gispert (1998), include emission from
the CMBR, the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from galaxy
clusters, as well as Galactic dust, free-free and synchrotron emission. We find
that the MEM technique performs well and produces faithful reconstructions of
the main input components. The method is also compared with traditional Wiener
filtering and is shown to produce consistently better results, particularly in
the recovery of the thermal SZ effect.Comment: 31 pages, 19 figures (bitmapped), accpeted for publication in MNRA
Reconstructing Galaxy Spectral Energy Distributions from Broadband Photometry
We present a novel approach to photometric redshifts, one that merges the
advantages of both the template fitting and empirical fitting algorithms,
without any of their disadvantages. This technique derives a set of templates,
describing the spectral energy distributions of galaxies, from a catalog with
both multicolor photometry and spectroscopic redshifts. The algorithm is
essentially using the shapes of the templates as the fitting parameters. From
simulated multicolor data we show that for a small training set of galaxies we
can reconstruct robustly the underlying spectral energy distributions even in
the presence of substantial errors in the photometric observations. We apply
these techniques to the multicolor and spectroscopic observations of the Hubble
Deep Field building a set of template spectra that reproduced the observed
galaxy colors to better than 10%. Finally we demonstrate that these improved
spectral energy distributions lead to a photometric-redshift relation for the
Hubble Deep Field that is more accurate than standard template-based
approaches.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX AASTeX, accepted for publication in A
Past and present cosmic structure in the SDSS DR7 main sample
We present a chrono-cosmography project, aiming at the inference of the four
dimensional formation history of the observed large scale structure from its
origin to the present epoch. To do so, we perform a full-scale Bayesian
analysis of the northern galactic cap of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
Data Release 7 main galaxy sample, relying on a fully probabilistic, physical
model of the non-linearly evolved density field. Besides inferring initial
conditions from observations, our methodology naturally and accurately
reconstructs non-linear features at the present epoch, such as walls and
filaments, corresponding to high-order correlation functions generated by
late-time structure formation. Our inference framework self-consistently
accounts for typical observational systematic and statistical uncertainties
such as noise, survey geometry and selection effects. We further account for
luminosity dependent galaxy biases and automatic noise calibration within a
fully Bayesian approach. As a result, this analysis provides highly-detailed
and accurate reconstructions of the present density field on scales larger than
Mpc, constrained by SDSS observations. This approach also leads to
the first quantitative inference of plausible formation histories of the
dynamic large scale structure underlying the observed galaxy distribution. The
results described in this work constitute the first full Bayesian non-linear
analysis of the cosmic large scale structure with the demonstrated capability
of uncertainty quantification. Some of these results will be made publicly
available along with this work. The level of detail of inferred results and the
high degree of control on observational uncertainties pave the path towards
high precision chrono-cosmography, the subject of simultaneously studying the
dynamics and the morphology of the inhomogeneous Universe.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure
Sensitivity of full-sky experiments to large scale cosmic ray anisotropies
The two main advantages of space-based observation of extreme energy
( eV) cosmic rays (EECRs) over ground based
observatories are the increased field of view and the full-sky coverage with
nearly uniform systematics across the entire sky. The former guarantees
increased statistics, whereas the latter enables a clean partitioning of the
sky into spherical harmonics. The discovery of anisotropies would help to
identify the long sought origin of EECRs. We begin an investigation of the
reach of a full-sky space-based experiment such as EUSO to detect anisotropies
in the extreme-energy cosmic-ray sky compared to ground based partial-sky
experiments such as the Pierre Auger Observatory and Telescope Array. The
technique is explained here, and simulations for a Universe with just two
nonzero multipoles, monopole plus either dipole or quadrupole, are presented.
These simulations quantify the advantages of space-based, all-sky coverage.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
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