Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Day 1649

Thursday, Friday.


1911.08491
The Pristine survey X: a large population of low-metallicity stars permeates the Galactic disk
Sestito, et al

The orbits of the least chemically enriched stars open a window on the formation of our Galaxy when it was still in its infancy. The common picture is that these low-metallicity stars are distributed as an isotropic, pressure-supported component since these stars were either accreted from the early building blocks of the assembling Milky Way, or were later brought by the accretion of faint dwarf galaxies. Combining the metallicities and radial velocities from the Pristine and LAMOST surveys and Gaia DR2 parallaxes and proper motions for an unprecedented large and unbiased sample of very metal-poor stars at $[Fe/H]\leq-2.5$ we show that this picture is incomplete. This sample shows strong statistical evidence (at the $5.0\sigma$ level) of asymmetry in their kinematics, favouring prograde motion. Moreover, we find that $31\%$ of the stars that currently reside in the disk do not venture outside of the disk plane throughout their orbit. The discovery of this population implies that a significant fraction of stars with iron abundances $[Fe/H]\leq-2.5$ formed within or concurrently with the Milky Way disk and that the history of the disk was quiet enough to allow them to retain their disk-like orbital properties.


1911.09121
Complementarity of peculiar velocity surveys and redshift space distortions for testing gravity
Kim, Linder

Peculiar-velocity surveys of the low-redshift universe have significant leverage to constrain the growth rate of cosmic structure and test gravity. Wide-field imaging surveys combined with multi-object spectrographs (e.g. ZTF2, LSST, DESI, 4MOST) can use Type Ia supernovae as informative tracers of the velocity field, reaching few percent constraints on the growth rate $f\sigma_8$ at $z\lesssim0.2$ where density tracers cannot do better than $\sim10\%$. Combining the high-redshift DESI survey mapping redshift space distortions with a low-redshift supernova peculiar velocity survey using LSST and DESI can determine the gravitational growth index to $\sigma(\gamma)\approx0.02$, testing general relativity. We study the characteristics needed for the peculiar velocity survey, and how its complementarity with clustering surveys improves when going from a $\Lambda$CDM model assumption to a $w_0$-$w_a$ cosmology.


1911.09567
Linearity and correction of the BF effecting LSST sensors
Lage

The Brighter-Fatter (hereafter BF) effect in CCD sensors causes increases in the image size of bright objects due to electrostatic repulsion of collected charges. Correcting this effect in the LSST camera is required in order to meet the science goals of the project, especially galaxy shape measurements for weak lensing. The current plan for BF image correction in the LSST is to use the deconvolution method described in Coulton, et.al. [1]. In this work, we study the linearity of the BF effect and effectiveness of the Coulton correction, using both simulation tools and measurements made on prototype LSST CCDs from both CCD vendors. We conclude that the proposed image correction method may be adequate to meet the LSST science goals, although more work is needed on the algorithms used to generate the image correction kernel from sensor measurements.

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