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Black Hole

Lensing of space time around a black hole. At Oxford we study black holes observationally and theoretically on all size and time scales - it is some of our core work.

Credit: ALAIN RIAZUELO, IAP/UPMC/CNRS. CLICK HERE TO VIEW MORE IMAGES.

Julien Devriendt

Professor of Astrophysics

Research theme

  • Astronomy and astrophysics
  • Particle astrophysics & cosmology

Sub department

  • Astrophysics

Research groups

  • Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
  • Cosmology
  • Galaxy formation and evolution
julien.devriendt@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 (2)73307
Denys Wilkinson Building, room 555D
  • About
  • Teaching
  • Publications

The diversity of rotation curves of galaxies in the NewHorizon cosmological simulation

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 539:4 (2025) 3797-3807

Authors:

RA Jackson, JF Navarro, IME Santos-Santos, S Kaviraj, SK Yi, S Peirani, Y Dubois, G Martin, JEG Devriendt, A Slyz, C Pichon, M Volonteri, T Kimm, K Kraljic

Abstract:

We use the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation NewHorizon to study the effects of the baryonic component on the inner mass profile of dark matter haloes of isolated galaxies (). Dark matter deficits (‘cores’) develop only in galaxies in a narrow range of stellar mass, . The lower stellar mass limit arises because a minimum amount of star formation is required to drive the baryonic outflows that redistribute dark matter and create a core. The upper limit roughly coincides with the total amount of dark matter initially contained within the innermost 2 kpc (), which roughly coincides with the stellar half-mass radius of these dwarfs. This enclosed mass is quite insensitive to the total virial mass of the system. The same upper limit applies to other simulations, like NIHAO and EAGLE-CHT10, despite their rather different galaxy formation efficiencies. This suggests that it is the galaxy total stellar mass that determines when a core is formed, and not the galaxy-to-dark halo mass ratio, as argued in earlier work. This is consistent with a back-of-the-envelope estimate for a SN-induced rate of orbital diffusion. Although NewHorizon dwarfs reproduce the observed diversity of rotation curves better than other simulations, there are significant differences in the gravitational importance of baryons in the inner regions of dwarfs compared to observations. These differences prevent us from concluding that cosmological simulations are currently fully able to account for the observed diversity of rotation curve shapes.

On unveiling buried nuclei with JWST: a technique for hunting the most obscured galaxy nuclei from local to high redshift

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences 696 (2025) A135

Authors:

I Garcia-Bernete, Fr Donnan, D Rigopoulou, M Pereira-Santaella, E Gonzalez-Alfonso, N Thatte, S Aalto, S Konig, M Maksymowicz-Maciata, Mw R Smith, J-S Huang, Ge Magdis, Pf Roche, J Devriendt, Slyz

Abstract:

We analyze JWST NIRSpec+MIRI/MRS observations of the infrared (IR) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features in the central regions (∼0.26″ at 6 μm; ∼50–440 pc depending on the source) of local luminous IR galaxies. In this work, we examine the effect of nuclear obscuration on the PAH features of deeply obscured nuclei, predominantly found in local luminous IR galaxies, and we compare these nuclei with “normal� star-forming regions. We extend previous work to include shorter wavelength PAH ratios now available with the NIRSpec+MIRI/MRS spectral range. We introduce a new diagnostic diagram for selecting deeply obscured nuclei based on the 3.3 and 6.2 μm PAH features and/or mid-IR continuum ratios at ∼3 and 5 μm. We find that the PAH equivalent width ratio of the brightest PAH features at shorter wavelengths (at 3.3 and 6.2 μm) is impacted by nuclear obscuration. Although the sample of luminous IR galaxies used in this analysis is relatively small, we find that sources exhibiting a high silicate absorption feature cluster tightly in a specific region of the diagram, whereas star-forming regions experiencing lower extinction levels occupy a different area in the diagram. This demonstrates the potential of this technique to identify buried nuclei. To leverage the excellent sensitivity of the MIRI imager on board JWST, we extend our method of identifying deeply obscured nuclei at higher redshifts using a selection of MIRI filters. Specifically, the combination of various MIRI JWST filters enables the identification of buried sources beyond the local Universe and up to z ∼ 3, where other commonly used obscuration tracers such as the 9.7 μm silicate band, are out of the spectral range of MRS. Our results pave the way for identifying distant deeply obscured nuclei with JWST.

On unveiling Buried Nuclei with JWST: a technique for hunting the most obscured galaxy nuclei from local to high redshift

(2025)

Authors:

I García-Bernete, FR Donnan, D Rigopoulou, M Pereira-Santaella, E González-Alfonso, N Thatte, S Aalto, S König, M Maksymowicz-Maciata, MWR Smith, J-S Huang, GE Magdis, PF Roche, J Devriendt, A Slyz

The Velocity Field Olympics: Assessing velocity field reconstructions with direct distance tracers

(2025)

Authors:

Richard Stiskalek, Harry Desmond, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz, Guilhem Lavaux, Michael J Hudson, Deaglan J Bartlett, Hélène M Courtois

Inferring the ionizing photon contributions of high-redshift galaxies to reionization with JWST NIRCam photometry

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 537:3 (2025) staf126

Authors:

Nicholas Choustikov, Richard Stiskalek, Aayush Saxena, Harley Katz, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz

Abstract:

JWST observations are providing unprecedented constraints on the history of reionization owing to the ability to detect faint galaxies at z ≫ 6. Modelling this history requires understanding both the ionizing photon production rate (ξion) and the fraction of those photons that escape into the intergalactic medium (fesc). Observational estimates of these quantities generally rely on spectroscopy for which large samples with well-defined selection functions remain limited. To overcome this challenge, we present and release a novel implicit likelihood inference pipeline, PHOTONIOn, trained on mock photometry to predict the escaped ionizing luminosity of individual galaxies (N ion) based on photometric magnitudes and redshifts. We show that PHOTONIOn is able to reliably infer N ion from photometry. This is in contrast to traditional spectral energy distribution-fitting approaches which rely on fesc prescriptions that often overpredict N ion for Lyman Continuum (LyC)-dim galaxies, even when given access to spectroscopic data. We have deployed PHOTONIOn on a sample of 4559 high-redshift galaxies from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), finding gentle redshift evolutions of log10(N ion) = (0.08 ± 0.01)z + (51.60 ± 0.06) and log10(fescξion) = (0.07 ± 0.01)z + (24.12 ± 0.07). Late-time values for the ionizing photon production rate density are consistent with both theoretical models and observations. Finally, we measure the evolution of the intergalactic medium ionized fraction to find that observed populations of star-forming galaxies are capable of driving reionization in this field to completion by z ∼ 5.3 without the need for active galactic nucleus or other exotic sources, consistent with other studies of the same field. The 20 per cent of UV-brightest galaxies (MUV < −18.5) reionize roughly 35 per cent of the survey volume, demonstrating that UV faint LyC emitters are crucial for reionization.

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