8,996 research outputs found
Possible High-Redshift, Low-Luminosity AGN Activity in the Hubble Deep Field
In the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), twelve candidate sources of high-redshift (z
> 3.5) AGN activity have been identified. The color selection criteria were
established by passing spectra of selected quasars and Seyfert galaxies
(appropriately redshifted and modified for "Lyman forest" absorption), as well
as stars, observed normal and starburst galaxies, and galaxy models for various
redshifts through the filters used for the HDF observations. The actual
identification of AGN candidates also involved convolving a
Laplacian-of-Gaussian filter with the HDF images, thereby removing relatively
flat galactic backgrounds and leaving only the point-like components in the
centers. Along with positions and colors, estimated redshifts and absolute
magnitudes are reported, with the candidates falling toward the faint end of
the AGN luminosity function. One candidate has been previously observed
spectroscopically, with a measured redshift of 4.02. The number of sources
reported here is consistent with a simple extrapolation of the observed quasar
luminosity function to magnitude 30 in B_Johnson. Implications for ionization
of the intergalactic medium and for gravitational lensing are discussed.Comment: 10 pages LaTex plus 2 separate files (Table 1 which is a two-page
landscape LaTex file; and Figure 6 which is a large (0.7 MB) non-encapsulated
postscript file). Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa
A complete distribution of redshifts for sub-millimetre galaxies in the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey UDS field
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society following peer review. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx1689. Ā© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.Sub-milllimetre galaxies (SMGs) are some of the most luminous star-forming galaxies in the Universe, however their properties remain hard to determine due to the difficulty of identifying their optical\slash near-infrared counterparts. One of the key steps to determining the nature of SMGs is measuring a redshift distribution representative of the whole population. We do this by applying statistical techniques to a sample of 761 850m sources from the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey observations of the UKIDSS Ultra-Deep Survey (UDS) Field. We detect excess galaxies around per cent of the 850m positions in the deep UDS catalogue, giving us the first 850m selected sample to have virtually complete optical\slash near-infrared redshift information. Under the reasonable assumption that the redshifts of the excess galaxies are representative of the SMGs themselves, we derive a median SMG redshift of , with 68 per cent of SMGs residing between $1.07Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
The Likelihood Ratio as a tool for Radio Continuum Surveys with SKA precursor telescopes
In this paper we investigate the performance of the likelihood ratio method
as a tool for identifying optical and infrared counterparts to proposed radio
continuum surveys with SKA precursor and pathfinder telescopes. We present a
comparison of the infrared counterparts identified by the likelihood ratio in
the VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) survey to radio observations
with 6, 10 and 15 arcsec resolution. We cross-match a deep radio catalogue
consisting of radio sources with peak flux density 60 Jy with deep
near-infrared data limited to 22.6. Comparing the
infrared counterparts from this procedure to those obtained when cross-matching
a set of simulated lower resolution radio catalogues indicates that degrading
the resolution from 6 arcsec to 10 and 15 arcsec decreases the completeness of
the cross-matched catalogue by approximately 3 and 7 percent respectively. When
matching against shallower infrared data, comparable to that achieved by the
VISTA Hemisphere Survey, the fraction of radio sources with reliably identified
counterparts drops from 89%, at 22.6, to 47% with
20.0. Decreasing the resolution at this shallower
infrared limit does not result in any further decrease in the completeness
produced by the likelihood ratio matching procedure. However, we note that
radio continuum surveys with the MeerKAT and eventually the SKA, will require
long baselines in order to ensure that the resulting maps are not limited by
instrumental confusion noise.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in mnra
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Farmers' management of rice varietal diversity in the mid-hills of Nepal: implications for on-farm conservation and crop improvement
Season-long monitoring of on-farm rice (Oryza sativa, L.) plots in Nepal explored farmers' decision-making process on the deployment of varieties to agroecosystems, application of production inputs to varieties, agronomic practices and relationship between economic return and area planted per variety. Farmers deploy varieties [landraces (LRs) and modern varieties (MVs)] to agroecosystems based on their understanding of characteristics of varieties and agroecosystems, and the interaction between them. In marginal growing conditions, LRs can compete with MVs. Within an agroecosystem, economic return and area planted to varieties have positive relationship, but this is not so between agroecosystems. LRs are very diverse on agronomic and economic traits; therefore, they cannot be rejected a priori as inferior materials without proper evaluation. LRs have to be evaluated for useful traits and utilized in breeding programmes to generate farmer-preferred materials for marginal environments and for their conservation on-farm
The discovery of a typical radio galaxy at z = 4.88
āThe definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Royal Astronomical Society. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-3933.2009.00715.xIn this Letter, we report the discovery of a z= 4.88 radio galaxy discovered with a new technique which does not rely on pre-selection of a sample based on radio properties such as steep-spectral index or small angular size. This radio galaxy was discovered in the Elais-N2 field and has a spectral index of Ī±= 0.75 , i.e. not ultra-steep spectrum. It also has a luminosity consistent with being drawn from the break of the radio luminosity function and can therefore be considered as a typical radio galaxy. Using the Spitzer Wide-Area Infrared Extragalactic Survey (SWIRE) data over this field, we find that the host galaxy is consistent with being similarly massive to the lower redshift powerful radio galaxies (ā¼1ā3Lā
) . However, we note that at z= 4.88, the HĪ± line is redshifted into the IRAC 3.6 Ī¼m filter, and some of the flux in this band may be due to this fact rather than the stellar continuum emission. The discovery of such a distant radio source from our initial spectroscopic observations demonstrates the promise of our survey for finding the most distant radio sources.Peer reviewe
3D Reconstruction of the Density Field: An SVD Approach to Weak Lensing Tomography
We present a new method for constructing three-dimensional mass maps from
gravitational lensing shear data. We solve the lensing inversion problem using
truncation of singular values (within the context of generalized least squares
estimation) without a priori assumptions about the statistical nature of the
signal. This singular value framework allows a quantitative comparison between
different filtering methods: we evaluate our method beside the previously
explored Wiener filter approaches. Our method yields near-optimal angular
resolution of the lensing reconstruction and allows cluster sized halos to be
de-blended robustly. It allows for mass reconstructions which are 2-3
orders-of-magnitude faster than the Wiener filter approach; in particular, we
estimate that an all-sky reconstruction with arcminute resolution could be
performed on a time-scale of hours. We find however that linear, non-parametric
reconstructions have a fundamental limitation in the resolution achieved in the
redshift direction.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
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