分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to provide important observational diagnostics of nonlinear structure formation. Stellar streams in the Milky Way and Andromeda are spectacular evidence for ongoing satellite disruption. However, constructing a statistically meaningful sample of tidal streams beyond the Local Group has proven a daunting observational challenge, and the full potential for deepening our understanding of galaxy assembly using stellar streams has yet to be realised. Here we introduce the Stellar Stream Legacy Survey, a systematic imaging survey of tidal features associated with dwarf galaxy accretion around a sample of ~3100 nearby galaxies within z~0.02, including about 940 Milky Way analogues. Our survey exploits public deep imaging data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which reach surface brightness as faint as ~29 mag/arcsec^2 in the r band. As a proof of concept of our survey, we report the detection and broad-band photometry of 24 new stellar streams in the local Universe. We discuss how these observations can yield new constraints on galaxy formation theory through comparison to mock observations from cosmological galaxy simulations. These tests will probe the present-day mass assembly rate of galaxies, the stellar populations and orbits of satellites, the growth of stellar halos and the resilience of stellar disks to satellite bombardment.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: We describe the Milky Way Survey (MWS) that will be undertaken with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Mayall 4m telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Over the next 5 yr DESI MWS will observe approximately seven million stars at Galactic latitudes |b|>20 degrees, with an inclusive target selection scheme focused on the thick disk and stellar halo. MWS will also include several high-completeness samples of rare stellar types, including white dwarfs, low-mass stars within 100pc of the Sun, and horizontal branch stars. We summarize the potential of DESI to advance understanding of Galactic structure and stellar evolution. We introduce the final definitions of the main MWS target classes and estimate the number of stars in each class that will be observed. We describe our pipelines for deriving radial velocities, atmospheric parameters, and chemical abundances. We use ~500,000 spectra of unique stellar targets from the DESI Survey Validation program (SV) to demonstrate that our pipelines can measure radial velocities to ~1 km/s and [Fe/H] accurate to ~0.2 dex for typical stars in our main sample. We find the stellar parameter distributions from ~100 sq. deg of SV observations with >90% completeness on our main sample are in good agreement with expectations from mock catalogs and previous surveys.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: In 2021 May, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) began a 5 yr survey of approximately 50 million total extragalactic and Galactic targets. The primary DESI dark-time targets are emission line galaxies (ELGs), luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and quasars (QSOs). In bright time, DESI will focus on two surveys known as the Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS) and the Milky Way Survey (MWS). DESI also observes a selection of "secondary" targets for bespoke science goals. This paper gives an overview of the publicly available pipeline (desitarget) used to process targets for DESI observations. Highlights include details of the different DESI survey targeting phases, the targeting ID (TARGETID) used to define unique targets, the bitmasks used to indicate a particular type of target, the data model and structure of DESI targeting files, and examples of how to access and use the desitarget code base. This paper will also describe "supporting" DESI target classes, such as standard stars, sky locations, and random catalogs that mimic the angular selection function of DESI targets. The DESI target selection pipeline is complex and sizable; this paper attempts to summarize the most salient information required to understand and work with DESI targeting data.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: To understand how the evolution of grain size distribution in galaxies affects observed dust properties, we apply a post-processing dust evolution model to galaxy merger trees from the IllustrisTNG cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. Our dust model includes stellar dust production, sputtering in hot gas, dust growth by accretion and coagulation in the dense interstellar medium (ISM), and shattering in the diffuse ISM. We decompose the grain size distribution into different dust species depending on the elemental abundances and the dense ISM fraction given by the simulation. In our previous work, we focused on Milky Way (MW) analogs and reproduced the observed MW extinction curve. In this study, we compute dust spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for the MW analogues. Our simulated SEDs broadly reproduce the observed MW SED within their dispersion and so does the observational data of nearby galaxies, although they tend to underpredict the MW SED at short wavelengths where emission is dominated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). We find that metallicity and dense gas fraction are the most critical factors for the SED shape, through their influence on coagulation and shattering.The overall success of our models in reproducing the MW SED further justifies the dust evolution processes included in the model and predicts the dispersion in the SEDs caused by the variety in the assembly history. We also show that the most significant increase in the dust SED occurs between redshifts $z\sim 3$ and 2 in the progenitors of the simulated MW-like galaxies.