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Abstract:

In our hierarchical structure-formation paradigm, the observed morphological evolution of massive galaxies – from rotationally supported discs to dispersion-dominated spheroids – is largely explained via galaxy merging. However, since mergers are likely to destroy discs, and the most massive galaxies have the richest merger histories, it is surprising that any discs exist at all at the highest stellar masses. Recent theoretical work by our group has used a cosmological, hydrodynamical simulation to suggest that extremely massive (M* > 1011.4 M⊙) discs form primarily via minor mergers between spheroids and gas-rich satellites, which create new rotational stellar components and leave discs as remnants. Here, we use UV-optical and H I data of massive galaxies, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Evolution Explorer, Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), and Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA surveys, to test these theoretical predictions. Observed massive discs account for ∼13 per cent of massive galaxies, in good agreement with theory (∼11 per cent). ∼64 per cent of the observed massive discs exhibit tidal features, which are likely to indicate recent minor mergers, in the deep DECaLS images (compared to ∼60 per cent in their simulated counterparts). The incidence of these features is at least four times higher than in low-mass discs, suggesting that, as predicted, minor mergers play a significant (and outsized) role in the formation of these systems. The empirical star formation rates agree well with theoretical predictions and, for a small galaxy sample with H I detections, the H I masses and fractions are consistent with the range predicted by the simulation. The good agreement between theory and observations indicates that extremely massive discs are indeed remnants of recent minor mergers between spheroids and gas-rich satellites.

Abstract:

We introduce and validate a delensing framework for the Simons Observatory (SO), which will be used to improve constraints on inflationary gravitational waves by reducing the lensing noise in measurements of the B modes in CMB polarization. SO will initially observe CMB by using three small aperture telescopes and one large-aperture telescope. While polarization maps from small-aperture telescopes will be used to constrain inflationary gravitational waves, the internal CMB lensing maps used to delens will be reconstructed from data from the large-aperture telescope. Since lensing maps obtained from the SO data will be noise dominated on subdegree scales, the SO lensing framework constructs a template for lensing-induced B modes by combining internal CMB lensing maps with maps of the cosmic infrared background from Planck as well as galaxy density maps from the LSST survey. We construct a likelihood for constraining the tensor-to-scalar ratio r that contains auto and cross spectra between observed B modes and the lensing B-mode template. We test our delensing analysis pipeline on map-based simulations containing survey nonidealities, but that, for this initial exploration, does not include contamination from Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. We find that the SO survey masking and inhomogeneous and atmospheric noise have very little impact on the delensing performance, and the r constraint becomes σ(r)≈0.0015 which is close to that obtained from the idealized forecasts in the absence of the Galactic foreground and is nearly a factor of 2 tighter than without delensing. We also find that uncertainties in the external large-scale structure tracers used in our multitracer delensing pipeline lead to bias much smaller than the 1σ statistical uncertainties.

Abstract: