Barred spiral galaxy | EPFL Graph Search

A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. Bars are found in about two thirds of all spiral galaxies, and generally affect both the motions of stars and interstellar gas within spiral galaxies and can affect spiral arms as well. The Milky Way Galaxy, where the Solar System is located, is classified as a barred spiral galaxy. Edwin Hubble classified spiral galaxies of this type as "SB" (spiral, barred) in his Hubble sequence and arranged them into sub-categories based on how open the arms of the spiral are. SBa types feature tightly bound arms, while SBc types are at the other extreme and have loosely bound arms. SBb-type galaxies lie in between the two. SB0 is a barred lenticular galaxy. A new type, SBm, was subsequently created to describe somewhat irregular barred spirals, such as the Magellanic Clouds, which were once classified as irregular galaxies, but have since been found to contain barred spiral str

Three quasi-stellar objects acting as strong gravitational lenses

Frédéric Courbin, Georges Meylan, François Henri Ambroise Rérat, Malte Tewes

We report the discovery of three new cases of quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) acting as strong gravitational lenses on background emission line galaxies: SDSS J0827+5224 (z(QSO) = 0.293, z(s) = 0.412), SDSS J0919+2720 (z(QSO) = 0.209, z(s) = 0.558), SDSS J1005+4016 (z(QSO) = 0.230, z(s) = 0.441). The selection was carried out using a sample of 22,298 SDSS spectra displaying at least four emission lines at a redshift beyond that of the foreground QSO. The lensing nature is confirmed from Keck imaging and spectroscopy, as well as from HST/WFC3 imaging in the F475W and F814W filters. Two of the QSOs have face-on spiral host galaxies and the third is a QSO+galaxy pair. The velocity dispersion of the host galaxies, inferred from simple lens modeling, is between sigma = 210 and 285 km s(-1), making these host galaxies comparable in mass with the SLACS sample of early-type strong lenses.

2012

ASTErIsM: application of topometric clustering algorithms in automatic galaxy detection and classification

Frédéric Courbin, Jean-Paul Richard Kneib, Danuta Janina Paraficz

We present a study on galaxy detection and shape classification using topometric clustering algorithms. We first use the DBSCAN algorithm to extract, from CCD frames, groups of adjacent pixels with significant fluxes and we then apply the DENCLUE algorithm to separate the contributions of overlapping sources. The DENCLUE separation is based on the localization of pattern of local maxima, through an iterative algorithm, which associates each pixel to the closest local maximum. Our main classification goal is to take apart elliptical from spiral galaxies. We introduce new sets of features derived from the computation of geometrical invariant moments of the pixel group shape and from the statistics of the spatial distribution of the DENCLUE local maxima patterns. Ellipticals are characterized by a single group of local maxima, related to the galaxy core, while spiral galaxies have additional groups related to segments of spiral arms. We use two different supervised ensemble classification algorithms: Random Forest and Gradient Boosting. Using a sample of similar or equal to 24 000 galaxies taken from the Galaxy Zoo 2 main sample with spectroscopic redshifts, and we test our classification against the Galaxy Zoo 2 catalogue. We find that features extracted from our pipeline give, on average, an accuracy of similar or equal to 93 per cent, when testing on a test set with a size of 20 per cent of our full data set, with features deriving from the angular distribution of density attractor ranking at the top of the discrimination power.

Oxford Univ Press2016

The relation between star formation, morphology, and local density in high-redshift clusters and groups

Pascale Jablonka, Anja Von der Linden

We investigate how the [O II] properties and the morphologies of galaxies in clusters and groups at z = 0.4-0.8 depend on projected local galaxy density, and compare with the field at similar redshifts and clusters at low z. In both nearby and distant clusters, higher density regions contain proportionally fewer star-forming galaxies, and the average [O II] equivalent width of star-forming galaxies is independent of local density. However, in distant clusters the average current star formation rate (SFR) in star-forming galaxies seems to peak at densities similar to 15-40 galaxies Mpc(-2). At odds with low-z results, at high z the relation between star-forming fraction and local density varies from high- to low-mass clusters. Overall, our results suggest that at high z the current star formation ( SF) activity in star-forming galaxies does not depend strongly on global or local environment, though the possible SFR peak seems at odds with this conclusion. We find that the cluster SFR normalized by cluster mass anticorrelates with mass and correlates with the star-forming fraction. These trends can be understood given (1) that the average star-forming galaxy forms about 1M(circle dot) yr(-1) (uncorrected for dust) in all clusters; (2) that the total number of galaxies scales with cluster mass; and (3) the dependence of star-forming fraction on cluster mass. We present the morphology-density ( MD) relation for our z 0.4 - 0.8 clusters, and uncover that the decline of the spiral fraction with density is entirely driven by galaxies of type Sc or later. For galaxies of a given Hubble type, we see no evidence that SF properties depend on local environment. In contrast with recent findings at low z, in our distant clusters the SF-density relation and the MD relation are equivalent, suggesting that neither of the two is more fundamental than the other.

2008

The relation between star formation, morphology, and local density in high-redshift clusters and groups

Pascale Jablonka, Anja Von der Linden

2008