The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey is one of the largest contemporary spectroscopic surveys of low redshift galaxies. Covering an area of ∼286 deg2 (split among five survey regions) down to a ...limiting magnitude of r < 19.8 mag, we have collected spectra and reliable redshifts for 238 000 objects using the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. In addition, we have assembled imaging data from a number of independent surveys in order to generate photometry spanning the wavelength range 1 nm–1 m. Here, we report on the recently completed spectroscopic survey and present a series of diagnostics to assess its final state and the quality of the redshift data. We also describe a number of survey aspects and procedures, or updates thereof, including changes to the input catalogue, redshifting and re-redshifting, and the derivation of ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared photometry. Finally, we present the second public release of GAMA data. In this release, we provide input catalogue and targeting information, spectra, redshifts, ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared photometry, single-component Sérsic fits, stellar masses, Hα-derived star formation rates, environment information, and group properties for all galaxies with r < 19.0 mag in two of our survey regions, and for all galaxies with r < 19.4 mag in a third region (72 225 objects in total). The data base serving these data is available at http://www.gama-survey.org/.
The SuperCOSMOS all-sky galaxy catalogue Peacock, J. A; Hambly, N. C; Bilicki, M ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
10/2016, Letnik:
462, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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We describe the construction of an all-sky galaxy catalogue, using SuperCOSMOS scans of Schmidt photographic plates from the UK Schmidt Telescope and Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. The ...photographic photometry is calibrated using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, with results that are linear to 2 per cent or better. All-sky photometric uniformity is achieved by matching plate overlaps and also by requiring homogeneity in optical-to-2MASS colours, yielding zero-points that are uniform to 0.03 mag or better. The typical AB depths achieved are B
J < 21, R
F < 19.5 and I
N < 18.5, with little difference between hemispheres. In practice, the I
N plates are shallower than the B
J and R
F plates, so for most purposes we advocate the use of a catalogue selected in these two latter bands. At high Galactic latitudes, this catalogue is approximately 90 per cent complete with 5 per cent stellar contamination; we quantify how the quality degrades towards the Galactic plane. At low latitudes, there are many spurious galaxy candidates resulting from stellar blends: these approximately match the surface density of true galaxies at |b| = 30°. Above this latitude, the catalogue limited in B
J and R
F contains in total about 20 million galaxy candidates, of which 75 per cent are real. This contamination can be removed, and the sky coverage extended, by matching with additional data sets. This SuperCOSMOS catalogue has been matched with 2MASS and with WISE, yielding quasi-all-sky samples of respectively 1.5 million and 18.5 million galaxies, to median redshifts of 0.08 and 0.20. This legacy data set thus continues to offer a valuable resource for large-angle cosmological investigations.
We investigate the use of the cross-correlation between galaxies and galaxy groups to measure redshift-space distortions (RSD) and thus probe the growth rate of cosmological structure. This is ...compared to the classical approach based on using galaxy auto-correlation. We make use of realistic simulated galaxy catalogues that have been constructed by populating simulated dark matter haloes with galaxies through halo occupation prescriptions. We adapt the classical RSD dispersion model to the case of the group–galaxy cross-correlation function and estimate the RSD parameter β by fitting both the full anisotropic correlation function ξ
s
(r
p
, π) and its multipole moments. In addition, we define a modified version of the latter statistics by truncating the multipole moments to exclude strongly non-linear distortions at small transverse scales. We fit these three observable quantities in our set of simulated galaxy catalogues and estimate statistical and systematic errors on β for the case of galaxy–galaxy, group–group, and group–galaxy correlation functions. When ignoring off-diagonal elements of the covariance matrix in the fitting, the truncated multipole moments of the group–galaxy cross-correlation function provide the most accurate estimate, with systematic errors below 3 per cent when fitting transverse scales larger than 10 h
−1 Mpc. Including the full data covariance enlarges statistical errors but keep unchanged the level of systematic error. Although statistical errors are generally larger for groups, the use of group–galaxy cross-correlation can potentially allow the reduction of systematics while using simple linear or dispersion models.
We present a study of the redshift evolution of the projected correlation function of 593 X-ray selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with I AB < 23 and spectroscopic redshifts z < 4, extracted from ...the 0.5-2 keV X-ray mosaic of the 2.13 deg2 XMM- Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). We introduce a method to estimate the average bias of the AGN sample and the mass of AGN hosting halos, solving the sample variance using the halo model and taking into account the growth of the structure over time. We find evidence of a redshift evolution of the bias factor for the total population of XMM-COSMOS AGNs from to with an average mass of the hosting dark matter (DM) halos log M 0(h --1 M ) ~ 13.12 ? 0.12 that remains constant at all z < 2. Splitting our sample into broad optical line AGNs (BL), AGNs without broad optical lines (NL), and X-ray unobscured and obscured AGNs, we observe an increase of the bias with redshift in the range and which corresponds to a constant halo mass of log M 0(h --1 M ) ~ 13.28 ? 0.07 and log M 0(h --1 M ) ~ 13.00 ? 0.06 for BL/X-ray unobscured AGNs and NL/X-ray obscured AGNs, respectively. The theoretical models, which assume a quasar phase triggered by major mergers, cannot reproduce the high bias factors and DM halo masses found for X-ray selected BL AGNs with L BOL ~ 2 X 1045 erg s--1. Our work extends up to z ~ 2.2 the z 1 statement that, for moderate-luminosity X-ray selected BL AGNs, the contribution from major mergers is outnumbered by other processes, possibly secular ones such as tidal disruptions or disk instabilities.
Using the complete Galaxy and Mass Assembly I (GAMA-I) survey covering ∼142 deg2 to r
AB= 19.4, of which ∼47 deg2 is to r
AB= 19.8, we create the GAMA-I galaxy group catalogue (G3Cv1), generated ...using a friends-of-friends (FoF) based grouping algorithm. Our algorithm has been tested extensively on one family of mock GAMA lightcones, constructed from Λ cold dark matter N-body simulations populated with semi-analytic galaxies. Recovered group properties are robust to the effects of interlopers and are median unbiased in the most important respects. G3Cv1 contains 14 388 galaxy groups (with multiplicity ≥2), including 44 186 galaxies out of a possible 110 192 galaxies, implying ∼40 per cent of all galaxies are assigned to a group. The similarities of the mock group catalogues and G3Cv1 are multiple: global characteristics are in general well recovered. However, we do find a noticeable deficit in the number of high multiplicity groups in GAMA compared to the mocks. Additionally, despite exceptionally good local spatial completeness, G3Cv1 contains significantly fewer compact groups with five or more members, this effect becoming most evident for high multiplicity systems. These two differences are most likely due to limitations in the physics included of the current GAMA lightcone mock. Further studies using a variety of galaxy formation models are required to confirm their exact origin. The G3Cv1 catalogue will be made publicly available as and when the relevant GAMA redshifts are made available at http://www.gama-survey.org.
Abstract
The galaxy pairwise velocity dispersion (PVD) can provide important tests of non-standard gravity and galaxy formation models. We describe measurements of the PVD of galaxies in the Galaxy ...and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey as a function of projected separation and galaxy luminosity. Due to the faint magnitude limit (r < 19.8) and highly complete spectroscopic sampling of the GAMA survey, we are able to reliably measure the PVD to smaller scales (r⊥ = 0.01 h − 1 Mpc) than previous work. The measured PVD at projected separations r⊥ ≲ 1 h − 1 Mpc increases near monotonically with increasing luminosity from σ12 ≈ 200 km s − 1 at Mr = −17 mag to σ12 ≈ 600 km s − 1 at Mr ≈ −22 mag. Analysis of the Gonzalez-Perez et al. (2014) galform semi-analytic model yields no such trend of PVD with luminosity: the model overpredicts the PVD for faint galaxies. This is most likely a result of the model placing too many low-luminosity galaxies in massive haloes.
Halo abundances within the cosmic web Alonso, D; Eardley, E; Peacock, J A
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
03/2015, Letnik:
447, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We investigate the dependence of the mass function of dark-matter haloes on their environment within the cosmic web of large-scale structure. A dependence of the halo mass function on large-scale ...mean density is a standard element of cosmological theory, allowing mass-dependent biasing to be understood via the peak-background split. On the assumption of a Gaussian density field, this analysis can be extended to ask how the mass function depends on the geometrical environment: clusters, filaments, sheets and voids, as classified via the tidal tensor (the Hessian matrix of the gravitational potential). In linear theory, the problem can be solved exactly, and the result is attractively simple: the conditional mass function has no explicit dependence on the local tidal field, and is a function only of the local density on the filtering scale used to define the tidal tensor. There is nevertheless a strong implicit predicted dependence on geometrical environment, because the local density couples statistically to the derivatives of the potential. We compute the predictions of this model and study the limits of their validity by comparing them to results deduced empirically from N-body simulations. We have verified that, to a good approximation, the abundance of haloes in different environments depends only on their densities, and not on their tidal structure. In this sense we find relative differences between halo abundances in different environments with the same density which are smaller than similar to 13 per cent. Furthermore, for sufficiently large filtering scales, the agreement with the theoretical prediction is good, although there are important deviations from the Gaussian prediction at small, non-linear scales. We discuss how to obtain improved predictions in this regime, using the 'effective-universe' approach.
Wetland area in agricultural landscapes has been heavily reduced to gain land for crop production, but in recent years there is increased societal recognition of the negative consequences from ...wetland loss on nutrient retention, biodiversity and a range of other benefits to humans. The current trend is therefore to re-establish wetlands, often with an aim to achieve the simultaneous delivery of multiple ecosystem services, i.e., multifunctionality. Here we review the literature on key objectives used to motivate wetland re-establishment in temperate agricultural landscapes (provision of flow regulation, nutrient retention, climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation and cultural ecosystem services), and their relationships to environmental properties, in order to identify potential for tradeoffs and synergies concerning the development of multifunctional wetlands. Through this process, we find that there is a need for a change in scale from a focus on single wetlands to wetlandscapes (multiple neighboring wetlands including their catchments and surrounding landscape features) if multiple societal and environmental goals are to be achieved. Finally, we discuss the key factors to be considered when planning for re-establishment of wetlands that can support achievement of a wide range of objectives at the landscape scale.
Display omitted
•Wetlands are currently viewed by society as nature-based solutions to a range of societal problems•To identify incompatibilities between objectives for wetland re-establishment, we reviewed ecosystem and cultural objectives•Multifunctionality is inconceivable at the level of individual wetlands due to tradeoffs between objectives•Multifunctionality can instead be achieved at the landscape level, where objectives are optimized in different wetlands
The Combined EIS–NVSS Survey Of Radio Sources (CENSORS) is a 1.4-GHz radio survey selected from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) and complete to a flux density of 7.2 mJy. It targets the ESO Imaging ...Survey (EIS) Patch D, which is a 3 × 2-deg2 field centred on (J2000). This paper presents the results of spectroscopic observations of 143 of the 150 CENSORS sources. The primary motivation for these observations is to achieve sufficient spectroscopic completeness so that the sample may be used to investigate the evolution of radio sources. The observations result in secure spectroscopic redshifts for 63 per cent of the sample and likely redshifts (based on a single emission line, for example) for a further 8 per cent. Following the identification of the quasars and star-forming galaxies in the CENSORS sample, estimated redshifts are calculated for the remainder of the sample via the K−z relation for radio galaxies. Comparison of the redshift distribution of the CENSORS radio sources to distributions predicted by the various radio luminosity function evolution models of Dunlop & Peacock, results in no good match. This demonstrates that this sample can be used to expand upon previous work in that field.
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