Differences and similarities of stellar populations in LAEs and LBGs at z~3.4-6.8

Lyman alpha emitters (LAEs) and Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) represent the most common groups of star-forming galaxies at high z, and the differences between their inherent stellar populations (SPs) are a key factor in understanding early galaxy formation and evolution. We have run a set of SP burst-like models for a sample of 1558 sources at 3.4 < z < 6.8 from the Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources (SHARDS) over the GOODS-N field. This work focuses on the differences between the three different observational subfamilies of our sample: LAE–LBGs, no-Ly α LBGs, and pure LAEs. Single and double SP synthetic spectra were used to model the spectral energy distributions, adopting a Bayesian information criterion to analyze under which situations a second SP is required. We find that the sources are well modelled using a single SP in ∼79 per cent of the cases. The best models suggest that pure LAEs are typically young low-mass galaxies (⁠t∼26+41−25 Myr; Mstar∼5.6+12.0−5.5×108 M⊙⁠), undergoing one of their first bursts of star formation. On the other hand, no-Ly α LBGs require older SPs (t ∼ 71 ± 12 Myr), and they are substantially more massive (Mstar ∼ 3.5 ± 1.1 × 109 M⊙). LAE–LBGs appear as the subgroup that more frequently needs the addition of a second SP, representing an old and massive galaxy caught in a strong recent star-forming episode. The relative number of sources found from each subfamily at each z supports an evolutionary scenario from pure LAEs and single SP LAE–LBGs to more massive LBGs. Stellar mass functions are also derived, finding an increase of M* with cosmic time and a possible steepening of the low-mass slope from z ∼ 6 to z ∼ 5 with no significant change to z ∼ 4. Additionally, we have derived the SFR–Mstar relation, finding an SFR∝Mβstar behaviour with negligible evolution from z ∼ 4 to z ∼ 6

J-PLUS:Uncovering a large population of extreme [OIII] emitters in the local Universe

Over the past decades, several studies have discovered a population of galaxies undergoing very strong star formation events, called extreme emission line galaxies (EELGs). In this work, we exploit the capabilities of the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS), a wide field multifilter survey, with 2000 square degrees observed. We use it to identify EELGs at low redshift by their [OIII]5007 emission line. We intend to provide with a more complete, deep, and less biased sample of local EELGs. We select objects with an excess of flux in the J-PLUS mediumband $J0515$ filter, which covers the [OIII] line at z

Costs and benefits of automation for astronomical facilities

The Observatorio Astrof\'isico de Javalambre (OAJ{\dag}1) in Spain is a young astronomical facility, conceived and developed from the beginning as a fully automated observatory with the main goal of optimizing the processes in the scientific and general operation of the Observatory. The OAJ has been particularly conceived for carrying out large sky surveys with two unprecedented telescopes of unusually large fields of view (FoV): the JST/T250, a 2.55m telescope of 3deg field of view, and the JAST/T80, an 83cm telescope of 2deg field of view. The most immediate objective of the two telescopes for the next years is carrying out two unique photometric surveys of several thousands square degrees, J-PAS{\dag}2 and J-PLUS{\dag}3, each of them with a wide range of scientific applications, like e.g. large structure cosmology and Dark Energy, galaxy evolution, supernovae, Milky Way structure, exoplanets, among many others. To do that, JST and JAST are equipped with panoramic cameras under development within the J-PAS collaboration, JPCam and T80Cam respectively, which make use of large format (~ 10k x 10k) CCDs covering the entire focal plane. This paper describes in detail, from operations point of view, a comparison between the detailed cost of the global automation of the Observatory and the standard automation cost for astronomical facilities, in reference to the total investment and highlighting all benefits obtained from this approach and difficulties encountered. The paper also describes the engineering development of the overall facilities and infrastructures for the fully automated observatory and a global overview of current status, pinpointing lessons learned in order to boost observatory operations performance, achieving scientific targets, maintaining quality requirements, but also minimizing operation cost and human resources.Comment: Global Observatory Control System GOC

The miniJPAS survey: A search for extreme emission-line galaxies

This is an Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Context. Galaxies with extreme emission lines (EELGs) may play a key role in the evolution of the Universe, as well as in our understanding of the star formation process itself. For this reason an accurate determination of their spatial density and fundamental properties in different epochs of the Universe will constitute a unique perspective towards a comprehensive picture of the interplay between star formation and mass assembly in galaxies. In addition to this, EELGs are also interesting in order to explain the reionization of the Universe, since their interstellar medium (ISM) could be leaking ionizing photons, and thus they could be low z, analogous of extreme galaxies at high z. Aims. This paper presents a method to obtain a census of EELGs over a large area of the sky by detecting galaxies with rest-frame equivalent widths ≥300 Å in the emission lines [O II]λλ3727,3729Å, [O III]λ5007Å, and Hα. For this, we aim to use the J-PAS survey, which will image an area of ≈8000 deg2 with 56 narrow band filters in the optical. As a pilot study, we present a methodology designed to select EELGs on the miniJPAS images, which use the same filter dataset as J-PAS, and thus will be exportable to this larger survey. Methods. We make use of the miniJPAS survey data, conceived as a proof of concept of J-PAS, and covering an area of ≈1 deg2. Objects were detected in the rSDSS images and selected by imposing a condition on the flux in a given narrow-band J-PAS filter with respect to the contiguous ones, which is analogous to requiring an observed equivalent width larger than 300 Å in a certain emission line within the filter bandwidth. The selected sources were then classified as galaxies or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) after a comparison of their miniJPAS fluxes with those of a spectral database of objects known to present strong emission lines. This comparison also provided a redshift for each source, which turned out to be consistent with the spectroscopic redshifts when available (|Δz/(1 + zspec)| ≤ 0.01). Results. The selected candidates were found to show a compact appearance in the optical images, some of them even being classified as point-like sources according to their stellarity index. After discarding sources classified as QSOs, a total of 17 sources turned out to exhibit EW0 ≥ 300 Å in at least one emission line, thus constituting our final list of EELGs. Our counts are fairly consistent with those of other samples of EELGs in the literature, although there are some differences, which were expected due to biases resulting from different selection criteria. © J. Iglesias-Páramo et al. 2022.This work has been partially funded by projects PID2019-107408GB-C44 from the Spanish PNAYA, co-funded with FEDER, and grand P18-FR-2664, funded by Junta de Andalucía. We acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). RGD and LADG acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709), and PID2019-109067-GB100. IM acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the PID2019-106027GB-C41. JCM acknowledges partial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) through the grant PGC2018-097585-B-C22. SDP is grateful to the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies. LSJ acknowledges the support of CNPq (304819/2017-4) and FAPESP (2019/10923-5). JAFO acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union – NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Facility project ICTS-MRR-2021-03- CEFCA. Funding for the J-PAS Project has been provided by the Governments of España and Aragón though the Fondo de Inversión de Teruel, European FEDER funding and the MINECO and by the Brazilian agencies FINEP, FAPESP, FAPERJ and by the National Observatory of Brazil. Based on observations made with the JST/T250 telescope and PathFinder camera for the miniJPAS project at the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ), in Teruel, owned, managed, and operated by the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA). We acknowledge the OAJ Data Processing and Archiving Unit (UPAD) for reducing and calibrating the OAJ data used in this work. Funding for OAJ, UPAD, and CEFCA has been provided by the Governments of Spain and Aragón through the Fondo de Inversiones de Teruel; the Aragón Government through the Research Groups E96, E103, and E16_17R; the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) with grant PGC2018-097585-B-C21; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER, UE) under AYA2015-66211-C2-1-P, AYA2015-66211-C2-2, AYA2012-30789, and ICTS-2009-14; and European FEDER funding (FCDD10-4E-867, FCDD13-4E-2685). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Funding for SDSS-IV has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-IV web site is https://www.sdss.org/. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 898633.Peer reviewe

Clinical Characteristics and Prognosis of COPD Patients Hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2

Objective: To describe the characteristics and prognosis of patients with COPD admitted to the hospital due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Methods: The SEMI-COVID registry is an ongoing retrospective cohort comprising consecutive COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Spain since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. Data on demographics, clinical characteristics, comorbidities, laboratory tests, radiology, treatment, and progress are collected. Patients with COPD were selected and compared to patients without COPD. Factors associated with a poor prognosis were analyzed. Results: Of the 10,420 patients included in the SEMI-COVID registry as of May 21, 2020, 746 (7.16%) had a diagnosis of COPD. Patients with COPD are older than those without COPD (77 years vs 68 years) and more frequently male. They have more comorbidities (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes mellitus, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, ischemic heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, kidney failure) and a higher Charlson Comorbidity Index (2 vs 1, p<0.001). The mortality rate in COPD patients was 38.3% compared to 19.2% in patients without COPD (p<0.001). Male sex, a history of hypertension, heart failure, moderate-severe chronic kidney disease, presence of cerebrovascular disease with sequelae, degenerative neurological disease, dementia, functional dependence, and a higher Charlson Comorbidity Index have been associated with increased mortality due to COVID-19 in COPD patients. Survival was higher among patients with COPD who were treated with hydroxychloroquine (87.1% vs 74.9%, p<0.001) and with macrolides (57.9% vs 50%, p<0.037). Neither prone positioning nor non-invasive mechanical ventilation, high-flow nasal cannula, or invasive mechanical ventilation were associated with a better prognosis. Conclusion: COPD patients admitted to the hospital with SARS-CoV-2 infection have more severe disease and a worse prognosis than non-COPD patients

J-PLUS: Uncovering a large population of extreme [OIII] emitters in the local Universe

Over the past decades, several studies have discovered a population of galaxies undergoing very strong star formation events, called extreme emission line galaxies (EELGs). In this work, we exploit the capabilities of the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS), a wide field multifilter survey, with 2000 square degrees observed. We use it to identify EELGs at low redshift by their [OIII]5007 emission line. We intend to provide with a more complete, deep, and less biased sample of local EELGs. We select objects with an excess of flux in the J-PLUS mediumband $J0515$ filter, which covers the [OIII] line at z$<$0.06. We remove contaminants (stars and higher redshift systems) using J-PLUS and WISE infrared data, with SDSS spectra as a benchmark. We perform spectral energy distribution fitting to estimate the properties of the galaxies: line fluxes, equivalent widths (EWs), masses, etc. We identify 466 EELGs at ${\rm z} < 0.06$ with [OIII] EW over 300 \text{\AA} and $r$-band mag. below 20, of which 411 were previously unknown. Most show compact morphologies, low stellar masses ($\log (M_{\star}/M_{\odot}) \sim {8.13}^{+0.61}_{-0.58}$), low dust extinction ($E(B-V)\sim{0.1}^{+0.2}_{-0.1}$), and very young bursts of star formation (${3.0}^{+2.7}_{-2.0}$ Myr). Our method is up to $\sim$ 20 times more efficient detecting EELGs per Mpc$^3$ than broadband surveys, and as complete as magnitude-limited spectroscopic surveys (and reaching fainter objects). The sample is not directly biased against strong H$\alpha$ emitters, in contrast with broadband surveys. We demonstrate the capability of J-PLUS to identify, following a clear selection process, a large sample of previously unknown EELGs showing unique properties. A fraction of them are likely similar to the first galaxies in the Universe, but at a much lower redshift, which makes them ideal targets for follow-up studies.Comment: 22 pages, 22 figures. Submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysic

Characteristics and outcomes of an international cohort of 600 000 hospitalized patients with COVID-19

Background: We describe demographic features, treatments and clinical outcomes in the International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) COVID-19 cohort, one of the world’s largest international, standardized data sets concerning hospitalized patients. Methods: The data set analysed includes COVID-19 patients hospitalized between January 2020 and January 2022 in 52 countries. We investigated how symptoms on admission, co-morbidities, risk factors and treatments varied by age, sex and other characteristics. We used Cox regression models to investigate associations between demographics, symptoms, co-morbidities and other factors with risk of death, admission to an intensive care unit (ICU) and invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). Results: Data were available for 689 572 patients with laboratory-confirmed (91.1%) or clinically diagnosed (8.9%) SARS-CoV-2 infection from 52 countries. Age [adjusted hazard ratio per 10 years 1.49 (95% CI 1.48, 1.49)] and male sex [1.23 (1.21, 1.24)] were associated with a higher risk of death. Rates of admission to an ICU and use of IMV increased with age up to age 60 years then dropped. Symptoms, co-morbidities and treatments varied by age and had varied associations with clinical outcomes. The case-fatality ratio varied by country partly due to differences in the clinical characteristics of recruited patients and was on average 21.5%. Conclusions: Age was the strongest determinant of risk of death, with a ~30-fold difference between the oldest and youngest groups; each of the co-morbidities included was associated with up to an almost 2-fold increase in risk. Smoking and obesity were also associated with a higher risk of death. The size of our international database and the standardized data collection method make this study a comprehensive international description of COVID-19 clinical features. Our findings may inform strategies that involve prioritization of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who have a higher risk of death