10 research outputs found
The distribution of red and blue galaxies in groups: an empirical test of the halo model
The popular halo model predicts that the power spectrum of the galaxy
fluctuations is simply the sum of the large scale linear halo-halo power
spectrum and the weighted power spectrum of the halo profile. Previous studies
have derived halo parameters from the observed galaxy correlation function.
Here we test the halo model directly for self-consistency with a minimal set of
theoretical assumptions by utilising the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS).
We derive empirically the halo occupation and galaxy radial distributions in
the haloes of the 2dF Percolation-Inferred Galaxy Group (2PIGG) catalogue. The
mean halo occupation number is found to be well-fitted by a power-law, ~
M^b, at high masses, with b = 1.05, 0.88, 0.99 for red, blue and all galaxies
respectively (with 1-sigma errors of 15-19%). We find that the truncated NFW
profile provides a good fit to the galaxy radial distributions, with
concentration parameters c=3.9, 1.3, 2.4 for red, blue and all galaxies
respectively (with 1-sigma errors of 8-15%). Adding the observed linear power
spectrum to these results, we compare these empirical predictions of the halo
model with the observed correlation functions for these same 2dF galaxy
populations. We conclude that subject to some fine tuning it is an acceptable
model for the two-point correlations. Our analysis also explains why the
correlation function slope of the red galaxies is steeper than that of the blue
galaxies. It is mainly due to the number of red and blue galaxies per halo,
rather than the radial distribution within the haloes of the two galaxy
species.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures. MNRAS accepted version. Adds appx. on profile
fitting; now use truncated NF
Cosmological baryonic and matter densities from 600,000 SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies with photometric redshifts
We analyze MegaZ-LRG, a photometric-redshift catalogue of Luminous Red
Galaxies (LRGs) based on the imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) 4th Data Release. MegaZ-LRG, presented in a companion paper, contains
10^6 photometric redshifts derived with ANNz, an Artificial Neural Network
method, constrained by a spectroscopic sub-sample of 13,000 galaxies obtained
by the 2dF-SDSS LRG and Quasar (2SLAQ) survey. The catalogue spans the redshift
range 0.4 < z < 0.7 with an r.m.s. redshift error ~ 0.03(1+z), covering 5,914
deg^2 to map out a total cosmic volume 2.5 h^-3 Gpc^3. In this study we use the
most reliable 600,000 photometric redshifts to present the first cosmological
parameter fits to galaxy angular power spectra from a photometric redshift
survey. Combining the redshift slices with appropriate covariances, we
determine best-fitting values for the matter and baryon densities of Omega_m h
= 0.195 +/- 0.023 and Omega_b/Omega_m = 0.16 +/- 0.036 (with the Hubble
parameter h = 0.75 and scalar index of primordial fluctuations n = 1 held
fixed). These results are in agreement with and independent of the latest
studies of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and their precision is
comparable to analyses of contemporary spectroscopic-redshift surveys. We
perform an extensive series of tests which conclude that our power spectrum
measurements are robust against potential systematic photometric errors in the
catalogue. We conclude that photometric-redshift surveys are competitive with
spectroscopic surveys for measuring cosmological parameters in the simplest
vanilla models. Future deep imaging surveys have great potential for further
improvement, provided that systematic errors can be controlled.Comment: 24 pages, 23 figures, MNRAS accepte
ANNz: estimating photometric redshifts using artificial neural networks
We introduce ANNz, a freely available software package for photometric
redshift estimation using Artificial Neural Networks. ANNz learns the relation
between photometry and redshift from an appropriate training set of galaxies
for which the redshift is already known. Where a large and representative
training set is available ANNz is a highly competitive tool when compared with
traditional template-fitting methods.
The ANNz package is demonstrated on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release
1, and for this particular data set the r.m.s. redshift error in the range 0 <
z < 0.7 is 0.023. Non-ideal conditions (spectroscopic sets which are small, or
which are brighter than the photometric set for which redshifts are required)
are simulated and the impact on the photometric redshift accuracy assessed.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures. Replaced to match version accepted by PASP (minor
changes to original submission). The ANNz package may be obtained from
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~aa
Mock galaxy redshift catalogues from simulations: implications for Pan-STARRS1
We describe a method for constructing mock galaxy catalogues which are well
suited for use in conjunction with large photometric surveys. We use the
semi-analytic galaxy formation model of Bower et al. implemented in the
Millennium simulation. We apply our method to the specific case of the surveys
soon to commence with PS1, the first of 4 telescopes planned for the Pan-STARRS
system. PS1 has 5 photometric bands (grizy), and will carry out an all-sky 3pi
survey and a medium deep survey (MDS) over 84 sq.deg. We calculate the expected
magnitude limits for extended sources in the two surveys. We find that, after 3
years, the 3pi survey will have detected over 10^8 galaxies in all 5 bands, 10
million of which will lie at redshift z>0.9, while the MDS will have detected
over 10^7 galaxies with 0.5 million lying at z>2. These numbers at least double
if detection in the shallowest band, y is not required. We then evaluate the
accuracy of photometric redshifts estimated using an off-the-shelf photo-z
code. With the grizy bands alone it is possible to achieve an accuracy in the
3pi survey of Delta z/(1+z)~0.06 for 0.25<z<0.8, which could be reduced by
about 15% using near infrared photometry from the UKIDDS survey, but would
increase by about 25% for the deeper sample without the y band photometry. For
the MDS an accuracy of Delta z/(1+z)~0.05 is achievable for 0.02<z<1.5 using
grizy. A dramatic improvement in accuracy is possible by selecting only red
galaxies. In this case, Delta z/(1+z)~0.02-0.04 is achievable for ~100 million
galaxies at 0.4<z<1.1 in the 3pi survey and for 30 million galaxies in the MDS
at 0.4<z<2. We investigate the effect of using photo-z in the estimate of the
baryonic acoustic oscillation scale. We find that PS1 will achieve a similar
accuracy in this estimate as a spectroscopic survey of 20 million galaxies.Comment: 23 pages, 18 figures, accepted by MNRA
Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission
Abstract Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. It can be thought of as the process that perpetuates fit variants in cultural evolution. In humans, cultural evolution has led to the accumulation and refinement of skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents, in the form of few-shot imitation. Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution to play an algorithmic role in the development of artificial general intelligence