Statistical cosmology with quadratic density fields     

Peter Watts  Peter Coles 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2003,338(3):806-815

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New evidence for a linear colour–magnitude relation and a single Schechter function for red galaxies in a nearby cluster of galaxies down to M*+ 8     

S. Andreon  J.-C. Cuillandre  E. Puddu  Y. Mellier 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2006,372(1):60-68

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Optical monitoring of the quasar 4C 38.41     

B. Peng  J. Wu  X. Zhou 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2003,346(2):483-488

The results of a photometric monitoring of the quasar 4C 38.41, performed at the optical R and B bands in 2002 February–March, are presented. With a 60/90 cm Schmidt telescope at the Xinglong station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China, we observed the source exhibiting amplitude variations of up to 0.78 mag in both bands during the whole campaign. Intraday and even intranight variations are detected as well. A typical variability time-scale of about 36 d is derived from our 2-month observations at the optical bands, which is identical to that found at a radio wavelength of 92 cm, suggesting a common origin for the variations in 4C 38.41 from optical to radio bands.  相似文献   

Galaxy spectral parametrization in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey as a diagnostic of star formation history     

Darren S. Madgwick  Rachel Somerville  Ofer Lahav  Richard Ellis 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2003,343(3):871-879

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Shapelets – II. A method for weak lensing measurements     

Alexandre Refregier  David Bacon 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2003,338(1):48-56

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On cross-correlating weak lensing surveys     

Dipak Munshi  Patrick Valageas 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2005,356(2):439-455

The present generation of weak lensing surveys will be superseded by surveys run from space with much better sky coverage and high level of signal-to-noise ratio, such as the Supernova/Acceleration Probe ( SNAP ). However, removal of any systematics or noise will remain a major cause of concern for any weak lensing survey. One of the best ways of spotting any undetected source of systematic noise is to compare surveys that probe the same part of the sky. In this paper we study various measures that are useful in cross-correlating weak lensing surveys with diverse survey strategies. Using two different statistics – the shear components and the aperture mass – we construct a class of estimators which encode such cross-correlations. These techniques will also be useful in studies where the entire source population from a specific survey can be divided into various redshift bins to study cross-correlations among them. We perform a detailed study of the angular size dependence and redshift dependence of these observables and of their sensitivity to the background cosmology. We find that one-point and two-point statistics provide complementary tools which allow one to constrain cosmological parameters and to obtain a simple estimate of the noise of the survey.  相似文献   

Principal components in active galactic nuclei variability data and the estimation of the flux contributions from different components     

Chris Koen  Fred Lombard 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2005,357(2):793-799

It has been found that the near-infrared flux variations of Seyfert galaxies satisfy relations of the form   F_i ≈α _{i j} +β _{i j} F_j   , where F_i , F_j are the fluxes in filters i and j ; and  α _{i , j} , β _{i , j}   are constants. These relations have been used to estimate the constant contributions of the non-variable underlying galaxies. The paper attempts a formal treatment of the estimation procedure, allowing for the possible presence of a third component, namely non-variable hot dust. In an analysis of a sample of 38 Seyfert galaxies, inclusion of the hot dust component improves the model fit in approximately half the cases. All derived dust temperatures are below 300 K, in the range 540–860 K or above 1300 K. A noteworthy feature is the estimation of confidence intervals for the component contributions: this is achieved by bootstrapping. It is also pointed out that the model implies that such data could be fruitfully analysed in terms of principal components.  相似文献   

Automatic Determination of Stellar Atmospheric Parameters Using Neural Networks and Instance-Based Machine Learning     

Olac Fuentes 《Experimental Astronomy》2001,12(1):21-31

In this article we show how machine learning methods can beeffectively applied to the problem of automatically predictingstellar atmospheric parameters from spectral information, a veryimportant problem in stellar astronomy. We apply feedforwardneural networks, Kohonen's self-organizing maps andlocally-weighted regression to predict the stellar atmosphericparameters effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicityfrom spectral indices. Our experimental results show that thethree methods are capable of predicting the parameters with verygood accuracy. Locally weighted regression gives slightly betterresults than the other methods using the original dataset asinput, while self-organizing maps outperform the other methods when significant amounts of noise are added. We also implemented a heterogeneous ensemble of predictors, combining the results given by the three algorithms. This ensemble yields better results than any of the three algorithms alone, using both the original and the noisy data.  相似文献   

Parameter information from non-linear cosmological fields     

A.N. Taylor  P.I.R. Watts † 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2001,328(4):1027-1038

We develop a general formalism for analysing parameter information from non-Gaussian cosmic fields. The method can be adapted to include the non-linear effects in galaxy redshift surveys, weak lensing surveys and cosmic velocity field surveys as part of parameter estimation. It can also be used as a test of non-Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background. Generalizing maximum-likelihood analysis to second order, we calculate the non-linear Fisher information matrix and likelihood surfaces in parameter space. To this order we find that the information content is always increased by including non-linearity. Our methods are applied to a realistic model of a galaxy redshift survey, including non-linear evolution, galaxy bias, shot-noise and redshift-space distortions to second order. We find that including non-linearities allows all of the degeneracies between parameters to be lifted. Marginalized parameter uncertainties of a few per cent will then be obtainable using forthcoming galaxy redshift surveys.  相似文献   

The SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey – III. Astrometry     

N.C. Hambly  A.C. Davenhall  M.J. Irwin  H.T. MacGillivray 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2001,326(4):1315-1327

In this, the third in a series of three papers concerning the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey, we describe the astrometric properties of the data base. We describe the algorithms employed in the derivation of the astrometric parameters of the data, and demonstrate their accuracies by comparison with external data sets using the first release of data, the South Galactic Cap survey. We show that the celestial coordinates, which are tied to the International Celestial Reference Frame via the Tycho–2 reference catalogue, are accurate to better than ±0.2 arcsec at J , R ∼19,18 , rising to ±0.3 arcsec at J , R ∼22,21 , with positional-dependent systematic effects from bright to faint magnitudes at the ∼0.1-arcsec level. The proper motion measurements are shown to be accurate to typically ±10 mas yr⁻¹ at J , R ∼19,18 , rising to ±50 mas yr⁻¹ at J , R ∼22,21 , and are tied to zero using the extragalactic reference frame. We show that the zero-point errors in the proper motions are ≤1 mas yr⁻¹ for R >17 , and are no larger than ∼10 mas yr⁻¹ for R <17 mas yr⁻¹ .  相似文献