Refined position angle measurements for galaxies of the SDSS Stripe 82 co-added dataset

Position angle measurements of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies, as measured by the surface brightness profile fitting code of the SDSS photometric pipeline (Lupton 2001), are known to be strongly biased, especially in the case of almost face-on and highly inclined galaxies. To address this issue we developed a reliable algorithm which determines position angles by means of isophote fitting. In this paper we present our algorithm and a catalogue of position angles for 26397 SDSS galaxies taken from the deep co-added Stripe 82 (equatorial stripe) images.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Data are published on-line at http://www.vo.elte.hu/galmorp

Galaxy shape measurement with convolutional neural networks

We present our results from training and evaluating a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict galaxy shapes from wide-field survey images of the first data release of the Dark Energy Survey (DES DR1). We use conventional shape measurements as ground truth from an overlapping, deeper survey with less sky coverage, the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). We demonstrate that CNN predictions from single band DES images reproduce the results of CFHTLenS at bright magnitudes and show higher correlation with CFHTLenS at fainter magnitudes than maximum likelihood model fitting estimates in the DES Y1 im3shape catalogue. Prediction of shape parameters with a CNN is also extremely fast, it takes only 0.2 milliseconds per galaxy, improving more than 4 orders of magnitudes over forward model fitting. The CNN can also accurately predict shapes when using multiple images of the same galaxy, even in different color bands, with no additional computational overhead. The CNN is again more precise for faint objects, and the advantage of the CNN is more pronounced for blue galaxies than red ones when compared to the DES Y1 metacalibration catalogue, which fits a single Gaussian profile using riz band images. We demonstrate that CNN shape predictions within the metacalibration self-calibrating framework yield shear estimates with negligible multiplicative bias, $m < 10^{-3}$, and no significant PSF leakage. Our proposed setup is applicable to current and next generation weak lensing surveys where higher quality ground truth shapes can be measured in dedicated deep fields

Photo-Met: a non-parametric method for estimating stellar metallicity from photometric observations

Getting spectra at good signal-to-noise ratios takes orders of magnitudes more time than photometric observations. Building on the technique developed for photometric redshift estimation of galaxies, we develop and demonstrate a non-parametric photometric method for estimating the chemical composition of galactic stars. We investigate the efficiency of our method using spectroscopically determined stellar metallicities from SDSS DR7. The technique is generic in the sense that it is not restricted to certain stellar types or stellar parameter ranges and makes it possible to obtain metallicities and error estimates for a much larger sample than spectroscopic surveys would allow. We find that our method performs well, especially for brighter stars and higher metallicities and, in contrast to many other techniques, we are able to reliably estimate the error of the predicted metallicities.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in A

Interior Structures and Tidal Heating in the TRAPPIST-1 Planets

With seven planets, the TRAPPIST-1 system has the largest number of exoplanets discovered in a single system so far. The system is of astrobiological interest, because three of its planets orbit in the habitable zone of the ultracool M dwarf. Assuming the planets are composed of non-compressible iron, rock, and H$_2$O, we determine possible interior structures for each planet. To determine how much tidal heat may be dissipated within each planet, we construct a tidal heat generation model using a single uniform viscosity and rigidity for each planet based on the planet's composition. With the exception of TRAPPIST-1c, all seven of the planets have densities low enough to indicate the presence of significant H$_2$O in some form. Planets b and c experience enough heating from planetary tides to maintain magma oceans in their rock mantles; planet c may have eruptions of silicate magma on its surface, which may be detectable with next-generation instrumentation. Tidal heat fluxes on planets d, e, and f are lower, but are still twenty times higher than Earth's mean heat flow. Planets d and e are the most likely to be habitable. Planet d avoids the runaway greenhouse state if its albedo is $\gtrsim$ 0.3. Determining the planet's masses within $\sim0.1$ to 0.5 Earth masses would confirm or rule out the presence of H$_2$O and/or iron in each planet, and permit detailed models of heat production and transport in each planet. Understanding the geodynamics of ice-rich planets f, g, and h requires more sophisticated modeling that can self-consistently balance heat production and transport in both rock and ice layers.Comment: 34 pages, 3 tables, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics -- final version including corrections made in proof stag

Possibility for albedo estimation of exomoons: Why should we care about M dwarfs?

Occultation light curves of exomoons may give information on their albedo and hence indicate the presence of ice cover on the surface. Icy moons might have subsurface oceans thus these may potentially be habitable. The objective of our paper is to determine whether next generation telescopes will be capable of albedo estimations for icy exomoons using their occultation light curves. The success of the measurements depends on the depth of the moon's occultation in the light curve and on the sensitivity of the used instruments. We applied simple calculations for different stellar masses in the V and J photometric bands, and compared the flux drop caused by the moon's occultation and the estimated photon noise of next generation missions with 5 $\sigma$ confidence. We found that albedo estimation by this method is not feasible for moons of solar-like stars, but small M dwarfs are better candidates for such measurements. Our calculations in the J photometric band show that E-ELT MICADO's photon noise is just about 4 ppm greater than the flux difference caused by a 2 Earth-radii icy satellite in a circular orbit at the snowline of an 0.1 stellar mass star. However, considering only photon noise underestimates the real expected noise, because other noise sources, such as CCD read-out and dark signal become significant in the near infrared measurements. Hence we conclude that occultation measurements with next generation missions are far too challenging, even in the case of large, icy moons at the snowline of small M dwarfs. We also discuss the role of the parameters that were neglected in the calculations, e.g. inclination, eccentricity, orbiting direction of the moon. We predict that the first albedo estimations of exomoons will probably be made for large icy moons around the snowline of M4 -- M9 type main sequence stars.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A&

StePS: A Multi-GPU Cosmological N-body Code for Compactified Simulations

We present the multi-GPU realization of the StePS (Stereographically Projected Cosmological Simulations) algorithm with MPI-OpenMP-CUDA hybrid parallelization and nearly ideal scale-out to multiple compute nodes. Our new zoom-in cosmological direct N-body simulation method simulates the infinite universe with unprecedented dynamic range for a given amount of memory and, in contrast to traditional periodic simulations, its fundamental geometry and topology match observations. By using a spherical geometry instead of periodic boundary conditions, and gradually decreasing the mass resolution with radius, our code is capable of running simulations with a few gigaparsecs in diameter and with a mass resolution of $\sim 10^{9}M_{\odot}$ in the center in four days on three compute nodes with four GTX 1080Ti GPUs in each. The code can also be used to run extremely fast simulations with reasonable resolution for fitting cosmological parameters. These simulations are useful for prediction needs of large surveys. The StePS code is publicly available for the research community