Anti-Black racism workshop during the Vera C. Rubin Observatory virtual 2021 Project and Community Workshop

Systemic racism is a ubiquitous theme in societies worldwide and plays a central role in shaping our economic, social, and academic institutions. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a major US ground-based facility based in Chile with international participation. The Observatory is an example of excellence and will deliver the largest survey of the sky ever attempted. Rubin's full scientific and social potential can not be attained without addressing systemic racism and associated barriers to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). During Rubin's 2021 virtual Project and Community Workshop (PCW), the annual Rubin community-based meeting, an anti-Black racism workshop took place, facilitated by 'The BIPOC Project' organization. About 60 members from different parts of the Rubin ecosystem participated. We describe the motivation, organization, challenges, outcomes, and near- and long-term goals of this workshop.Comment: Contribution to appear in 'An Astronomical Inclusion Revolution: Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Professional Astronomy and Astrophysics', to be published by IOP ebook

A General Framework for Removing Point Spread Function Additive Systematics in Cosmological Weak Lensing Analysis

Cosmological weak lensing measurements rely on a precise measurement of the shear two-point correlation function (2PCF) along with a deep understanding of systematics that affect it. In this work, we demonstrate a general framework for describing the impact of PSF systematics on the cosmic shear 2PCF, and mitigating its impact on cosmological analysis. Our framework can describe leakage and modeling error from all spin-2 quantities contributed by the PSF second and higher moments, rather than just the second moments. We interpret null tests using the HSC Year 3 (Y3) catalogs with this formalism, and find that leakage from the spin-2 combination of PSF fourth moments is the leading contributor to additive shear systematics, with total contamination that is an order of magnitude higher than that contributed by PSF second moments alone. We conducted a mock cosmic shear analysis for HSC Y3, and find that, if uncorrected, PSF systematics can bias the cosmological parameters $\Omega_m$ and $S_8$ by $\sim$0.3$\sigma$. The traditional second moment-based model can only correct for a 0.1$\sigma$ bias, leaving the contamination largely uncorrected. We conclude it is necessary to model both PSF second and fourth moment contamination for HSC Y3 cosmic shear analysis. We also reanalyze the HSC Y1 cosmic shear analysis with our updated systematics model, and identify a 0.07$\sigma$ bias on $\Omega_m$ when using the more restricted second moment model from the original analysis. We demonstrate how to self-consistently use the method in both real space and Fourier space, assess shear systematics in tomographic bins, and test for PSF model overfitting.Comment: 29 pages, 25 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Comments welcome

Photometry, Centroid and Point-Spread Function Measurements in the LSST Camera Focal Plane Using Artificial Stars

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera pixel response has been characterized using laboratory measurements with a grid of artificial stars. We quantify the contributions to photometry, centroid, point-spread function size, and shape measurement errors due to small anomalies in the LSSTCam CCDs. The main sources of those anomalies are quantum efficiency variations and pixel area variations induced by the amplifier segmentation boundaries and "tree-rings" -- circular variations in silicon doping concentration. We studied the effects using artificial stars projected on the sensors and find that the resulting measurement uncertainties pass the ten-year LSST survey science requirements. In addition, we verify that the tree-ring effects can be corrected using flat-field images if needed, because the astronomic shifts and shape measurement errors they induce correlate well with the flat-field signal. Nevertheless, further sensor anomaly studies with on-sky data should probe possible temporal and wavelength-dependent effects.Comment: Submitted to PAS

Design of a Skipper CCD Focal Plane for the SOAR Integral Field Spectrograph

We present the development of a Skipper Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) focal plane prototype for the SOAR Telescope Integral Field Spectrograph (SIFS). This mosaic focal plane consists of four 6k $\times$ 1k, 15 $\mu$m pixel Skipper CCDs mounted inside a vacuum dewar. We describe the process of packaging the CCDs so that they can be easily tested, transported, and installed in a mosaic focal plane. We characterize the performance of $\sim 650 \mu$m thick, fully-depleted engineering-grade Skipper CCDs in preparation for performing similar characterization tests on science-grade Skipper CCDs which will be thinned to 250$\mu$m and backside processed with an antireflective coating. We achieve a single-sample readout noise of $4.5 e^{-} rms/pix$ for the best performing amplifiers and sub-electron resolution (photon counting capabilities) with readout noise $\sigma \sim 0.16 e^{-} rms/pix$ from 800 measurements of the charge in each pixel. We describe the design and construction of the Skipper CCD focal plane and provide details about the synchronized readout electronics system that will be implemented to simultaneously read 16 amplifiers from the four Skipper CCDs (4-amplifiers per detector). Finally, we outline future plans for laboratory testing, installation, commissioning, and science verification of our Skipper CCD focal plane

Consistent lensing and clustering in a low-S8 Universe with BOSS, DES Year 3, HSC Year 1, and KiDS-1000

We evaluate the consistency between lensing and clustering based on measurements from BOSS combined with galaxy-galaxy lensing from DES-Y3, HSC-Y1, KiDS-1000. We find good agreement between these lensing datasets. We model the observations using the Dark Emulator and fit the data at two fixed cosmologies: Planck (S 8 = 0.83), and a Lensing cosmology (S 8 = 0.76). For a joint analysis limited to large scales, we find that both cosmologies provide an acceptable fit to the data. Full utilisation of the higher signal-to-noise small-scale measurements is hindered by uncertainty in the impact of baryon feedback and assembly bias, which we account for with a reasoned theoretical error budget. We incorporate a systematic inconsistency parameter for each redshift bin, A, that decouples the lensing and clustering. With a wide range of scales, we find different results for the consistency between the two cosmologies. Limiting the analysis to the bins for which the impact of the lens sample selection is expected to be minimal, for the Lensing cosmology, the measurements are consistent with A=1; A = 0.91 ± 0.04 (A = 0.97 ± 0.06) using DES+KiDS (HSC). For the Planck case, we find a discrepancy: A = 0.79 ± 0.03 (A = 0.84 ± 0.05) using DES+KiDS (HSC). We demonstrate that a kSZ-based estimate for baryonic effects alleviates some of the discrepancy in the Planck cosmology. This analysis demonstrates the statistical power of small-scale measurements, but caution is still warranted given modelling uncertainties and foreground sample selection effects

Chemical Analysis of the Brightest Star of the Cetus II Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Candidate

We present a detailed chemical abundance analysis of the brightest star in the ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxy candidate Cetus II from high-resolution Magellan/MIKE spectra. For this star, DES J011740.53-173053, abundances or upper limits of 18 elements from Carbon to Europium are derived. Its chemical abundances generally follow those of other UFD galaxy stars, with a slight enhancement of the alpha-elements (Mg, Si, and Ca) and low neutron-capture element (Sr, Ba, Eu) abundances supporting the classification of Cetus II as a likely UFD. The star exhibits lower Sc, Ti, and V abundances than Milky Way (MW) halo stars with similar metallicity. This signature is consistent with yields from a supernova (SN) originating from a star with a mass of ~11.2 solar masses. In addition, the star has a Potassium abundance of [K/Fe] = 0.81 which is somewhat higher than the K abundances of MW halo stars with similar metallicity, a signature which is also present in a number of UFD galaxies. A comparison including globular clusters (GC) and stellar stream stars suggests that high K is a specific characteristic for some UFD galaxy stars and can thus be used to help classify objects as UFD galaxies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables, accepted to Ap

DeepZipper: A Novel Deep-learning Architecture for Lensed Supernovae Identification

Large-scale astronomical surveys have the potential to capture data on large numbers of strongly gravitationally lensed supernovae (LSNe). To facilitate timely analysis and spectroscopic follow-up before the supernova fades, an LSN needs to be identified soon after it begins. To quickly identify LSNe in optical survey data sets, we designed ZipperNet, a multibranch deep neural network that combines convolutional layers (traditionally used for images) with long short-term memory layers (traditionally used for time series). We tested ZipperNet on the task of classifying objects from four categories—no lens, galaxy-galaxy lens, lensed Type-Ia supernova, lensed core-collapse supernova—within high-fidelity simulations of three cosmic survey data sets: the Dark Energy Survey, Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and a Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) imaging survey. Among our results, we find that for the LSST-like data set, ZipperNet classifies LSNe with a receiver operating characteristic area under the curve of 0.97, predicts the spectroscopic type of the lensed supernovae with 79% accuracy, and demonstrates similarly high performance for LSNe 1–2 epochs after first detection. We anticipate that a model like ZipperNet, which simultaneously incorporates spatial and temporal information, can play a significant role in the rapid identification of lensed transient systems in cosmic survey experiments

Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Intra-Cluster Light from Redshift 0.2 to 0.5

Using the full six years of imaging data from the Dark Energy Survey, we study the surface brightness profiles of galaxy cluster central galaxies and intra-cluster light. We apply a ``stacking'' method to over four thousand galaxy clusters identified by the redMaPPer cluster finding algorithm in the redshift range of 0.2 to 0.5. This yields high signal-to-noise radial profile measurements of the central galaxy and intra-cluster light out to 1 Mpc from the cluster center. Using redMaPPer richness as a cluster mass indicator, we find that the intra-cluster light brightness has a strong mass dependence throughout the 0.2 to 0.5 redshift range, and the dependence grows stronger at a larger radius. In terms of redshift evolution, we find some evidence that the central galaxy, as well as the diffuse light within the transition region between the cluster central galaxy and intra-cluster light within 80 kpc from the center, may be growing over time. At larger radii, more than 80 kpc away from the cluster center, we do not find evidence of additional redshift evolution beyond the cluster mass dependence, which is consistent with the findings from the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamic simulation. We speculate that the major driver of intra-cluster light growth, especially at large radii, is associated with cluster mass growth. Finally, we find that the color of the cluster central galaxy and intra-cluster light displays a radial gradient that becomes bluer at a larger radius, which is consistent with a stellar stripping and disruption origin of intra-cluster light as suggested by simulation studies.Comment: Submitted to MNRA

Building an Efficient Cluster Cosmology Software Package for Modeling Cluster Counts and Lensing

We introduce a software suite developed for galaxy cluster cosmological analysis with the Dark Energy Survey Data. Cosmological analyses based on galaxy cluster number counts and weak-lensing measurements need efficient software infrastructure to explore an increasingly large parameter space, and account for various cosmological and astrophysical effects. Our software package is designed to model the cluster observables in a wide-field optical survey, including galaxy cluster counts, their averaged weak-lensing masses, or the cluster's averaged weak-lensing radial signals. To ensure maximum efficiency, this software package is developed in C++ in the CosmoSIS software framework, making use of the CUBA integration library. We also implement a testing and validation scheme to ensure the quality of the package. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this development by applying the software to the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 galaxy cluster cosmological data sets, and acquired cosmological constraints that are consistent with the fiducial Dark Energy Survey analysis