Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology: publications

The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO Survey: The spectroscopic QSO catalogue

ArXiv 0810.4955 (2008)

Authors:

Scott M Croom, Gordon T Richards, Tom Shanks, Brian J Boyle, Robert G Sharp, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Terry Bridges, Robert J Brunner, Russell Cannon, Daniel Carson, Kuenley Chiu, Matthew Colless, Warrick Couch, Roberto De Propris, Michael J Drinkwater, Alastair Edge, Stephen Fine, Jon Loveday, Lance Miller, Adam D Myers, Robert C Nichol, Phil Outram, Kevin Pimbblet, Isaac Roseboom, Nicholas Ross, Donald P Schneider, Allyn Smith, Chris Stoughton, Michael A Strauss, David Wake

Abstract:

We present the final spectroscopic QSO catalogue from the 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO (2SLAQ) Survey. This is a deep, 18

Living in a void: testing the Copernican principle with distant supernovae.

Phys Rev Lett 101:13 (2008) 131302

Authors:

Timothy Clifton, Pedro G Ferreira, Kate Land

Abstract:

We show that the local redshift dependence of the luminosity distance can be used to test the Copernican principle that we are not in a central or otherwise special region of the Universe. Future surveys of type Ia supernovae that focus on a redshift range of approximately 0.1-0.4 will be ideally suited to observationally determine the validity of the Copernican principle on new scales, as well as probing the degree to which dark energy must be considered a necessary ingredient in the Universe.

The Cℓover experiment

Proceedings of SPIE the International Society for Optical Engineering 7020 (2008)

Authors:

L Piccirillo, P Ade, MD Audley, C Baines, R Battye, M Brown, P Calisse, A Challinor, WD Duncan, P Ferreira, W Gear, DM Glowacka, D Goldie, PK Grimes, M Halpern, V Haynes, GC Hilton, KD Irwin, B Johnson, M Jones, A Lasenby, P Leahy, J Leech, S Lewis, B Maffei, L Martinis, PD Mauskopf, SJ Melhuish, CE North, D O'Dea, S Parsley, G Pisano, CD Reintsema, G Savini, RV Sudiwala, D Sutton, A Taylor, G Teleberg, D Titterington, VN Tsaneva, C Tucker, R Watson, S Withington, G Yassin, J Zhang

Abstract:

CℓOVER is a multi-frequency experiment optimised to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization, in particular the B-mode component. CℓOVER comprises two instruments observing respectively at 97 GHz and 150/225 GHz. The focal plane of both instruments consists of an array of corrugated feed-horns coupled to TES detectors cooled at 100 mK. The primary science goal of CℓOVER is to be sensitive to gravitational waves down to r ∼ 0.03 (at 3σ) in two years of operations.

Tracing high density gas in M 82 and NGC 4038

The Astropysical Journal Letters (2008)

Authors:

E Bayet, C Lintott, S Viti, J Martín-Pintado, S Martín, DA Williams, JMC Rawlings

Abstract:

We present the first detection of CS in the Antennae galaxies towards the NGC 4038 nucleus, as well as the first detections of two high-J (5-4 and 7-6) CS lines in the center of M 82. The CS(7-6) line in M 82 shows a profile that is surprisingly different to those of other low-J CS transitions we observed. This implies the presence of a separate, denser and warmer molecular gas component. The derived physical properties and the likely location of the CS(7-6) emission suggests an association with the supershell in the centre of M 82.

Galaxy Zoo : Morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 389 (2008) 1179-1189

Authors:

CJ Lintott, K Schawinski, A Slosar, K Land, S Bamford, D Thomas, MJ Raddick, RC Nichol, A Szalay, D Andreescu, P Murray, JVD Berg

Abstract:

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This achievement was made possible by inviting the general public to visually inspect and classify these galaxies via the internet. The project has obtained more than 40,000,000 individual classifications made by ~100,000 participants. We discuss the motivation and strategy for this project, and detail how the classifications were performed and processed. We find that Galaxy Zoo results are consistent with those for subsets of SDSS galaxies classified by professional astronomers, thus demonstrating that our data provides a robust morphological catalogue. Obtaining morphologies by direct visual inspection avoids introducing biases associated with proxies for morphology such as colour, concentration or structual parameters. In addition, this catalogue can be used to directly compare SDSS morphologies with older data sets. The colour--magnitude diagrams for each morphological class are shown, and we illustrate how these distributions differ from those inferred using colour alone as a proxy for morphology.

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