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Jiangang Hao

Publications and source records attributed to Jiangang Hao.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2010

The Sloan Bright Arcs Survey : Discovery of Seven New Strongly Lensed Galaxies from z=0.66-2.94

We report the discovery of seven new, very bright gravitational lens systems from our ongoing gravitational lens search, the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey (SBAS). Two of the systems are confirmed to have high source redshifts z=2.19 and z=2.94. Three other systems lie at intermediate redshift with z=1.33,1.82,1.93 and two systems are at low redshift z=0.66,0.86. The lensed source galaxies in all of these systems are bright, with i-band magnitudes ranging from 19.73-22.06. We present the spectrum of each of the source galaxies in these systems along with estimates of the Einstein radius for each system. The foreground lens in most systems is identified by a red sequence based cluster finder as a galaxy group; one system is identified as a moderately rich cluster. In total the SBAS has now discovered 19 strong lens systems in the SDSS imaging data, 8 of which are among the highest surface brightness z\simeq2-3 galaxies known.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2010

Precision Measurements of the Cluster Red Sequence using an Error Corrected Gaussian Mixture Model

The red sequence is an important feature of galaxy clusters and plays a crucial role in optical cluster detection. Measurement of the slope and scatter of the red sequence are affected both by selection of red sequence galaxies and measurement errors. In this paper, we describe a new error corrected Gaussian Mixture Model for red sequence galaxy identification. Using this technique, we can remove the effects of measurement error and extract unbiased information about the intrinsic properties of the red sequence. We use this method to select red sequence galaxies in each of the 13,823 clusters in the maxBCG catalog, and measure the red sequence ridgeline location and scatter of each. These measurements provide precise constraints on the variation of the average red galaxy populations in the observed frame with redshift. We find that the scatter of the red sequence ridgeline increases mildly with redshift, and that the slope decreases with redshift. We also observe that the slope does not strongly depend on cluster richness. Using similar methods, we show that this behavior is mirrored in a spectroscopic sample of field galaxies, further emphasizing that ridgeline properties are independent of environment.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2010

Measuring the flatness of focal plane for very large mosaic CCD camera

Large mosaic multiCCD camera is the key instrument for modern digital sky survey. DECam is an extremely red sensitive 520 Megapixel camera designed for the incoming Dark Energy Survey (DES). It is consist of sixty two 4k$\times$2k and twelve 2k x 2k 250-micron thick fully-depleted CCDs, with a focal plane of 44 cm in diameter and a field of view of 2.2 square degree. It will be attached to the Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. The DES will cover 5000 square-degrees of the southern galactic cap in 5 color bands (g, r, i, z, Y) in 5 years starting from 2011. To achieve the science goal of constraining the Dark Energy evolution, stringent requirements are laid down for the design of DECam. Among them, the flatness of the focal plane needs to be controlled within a 60-micron envelope in order to achieve the specified PSF variation limit. It is very challenging to measure the flatness of the focal plane to such precision when it is placed in a high vacuum dewar at 173 K. We developed two image based techniques to measure the flatness of the focal plane. By imaging a regular grid of dots on the focal plane, the CCD offset along the optical axis is converted to the variation the grid spacings at different positions on the focal plane. After extracting the patterns and comparing the change in spacings, we can measure the flatness to high precision. In method 1, the regular dots are kept in high sub micron precision and cover the whole focal plane. In method 2, no high precision for the grid is required. Instead, we use a precise XY stage moves the pattern across the whole focal plane and comparing the variations of the spacing when it is imaged by different CCDs. Simulation and real measurements show that the two methods work very well for our purpose, and are in good agreement with the direct optical measurements.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2009

ArborZ: Photometric Redshifts Using Boosted Decision Trees

Precision photometric redshifts will be essential for extracting cosmological parameters from the next generation of wide-area imaging surveys. In this paper we introduce a photometric redshift algorithm, ArborZ, based on the machine-learning technique of Boosted Decision Trees. We study the algorithm using galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and from mock catalogs intended to simulate both the SDSS and the upcoming Dark Energy Survey. We show that it improves upon the performance of existing algorithms. Moreover, the method naturally leads to the reconstruction of a full probability density function (PDF) for the photometric redshift of each galaxy, not merely a single "best estimate" and error, and also provides a photo-z quality figure-of-merit for each galaxy that can be used to reject outliers. We show that the stacked PDFs yield a more accurate reconstruction of the redshift distribution N(z). We discuss limitations of the current algorithm and ideas for future work.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2009

Cosmological Constraints from the SDSS maxBCG Cluster Catalog

We use the abundance and weak lensing mass measurements of the SDSS maxBCG cluster catalog to simultaneously constrain cosmology and the richness--mass relation of the clusters. Assuming a flat \LambdaCDM cosmology, we find σ_8(Ω_m/0.25)^{0.41} = 0.832\pm 0.033 after marginalization over all systematics. In common with previous studies, our error budget is dominated by systematic uncertainties, the primary two being the absolute mass scale of the weak lensing masses of the maxBCG clusters, and uncertainty in the scatter of the richness--mass relation. Our constraints are fully consistent with the WMAP five-year data, and in a joint analysis we find σ_8=0.807\pm 0.020 and Ω_m=0.265\pm 0.016, an improvement of nearly a factor of two relative to WMAP5 alone. Our results are also in excellent agreement with and comparable in precision to the latest cosmological constraints from X-ray cluster abundances. The remarkable consistency among these results demonstrates that cluster abundance constraints are not only tight but also robust, and highlight the power of optically-selected cluster samples to produce precision constraints on cosmological parameters.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2008

An Improved Cluster Richness Estimator

Minimizing the scatter between cluster mass and accessible observables is an important goal for cluster cosmology. In this work, we introduce a new matched filter richness estimator, and test its performance using the maxBCG cluster catalog. Our new estimator significantly reduces the variance in the L_X-richness relation, from σ_{\ln L_X}^2=(0.86\pm0.02)^2 to σ_{\ln L_X}^2=(0.69\pm0.02)^2. Relative to the maxBCG richness estimate, it also removes the strong redshift dependence of the richness scaling relations, and is significantly more robust to photometric and redshift errors. These improvements are largely due to our more sophisticated treatment of galaxy color data. We also demonstrate the scatter in the L_X-richness relation depends on the aperture used to estimate cluster richness, and introduce a novel approach for optimizing said aperture which can be easily generalized to other mass tracers.

astro-ph↗
arXiv2008

Constraining the Scatter in the Mass-Richness Relation of maxBCG Clusters With Weak Lensing and X-ray Data

We measure the logarithmic scatter in mass at fixed richness for clusters in the maxBCG cluster catalog, an optically selected cluster sample drawn from SDSS imaging data. Our measurement is achieved by demanding consistency between available weak lensing and X-ray measurements of the maxBCG clusters, and the X-ray luminosity--mass relation inferred from the 400d X-ray cluster survey, a flux limited X-ray cluster survey. We find σ_{\ln M|N_{200}}=0.45^{+0.20}_{-0.18} (95% CL) at N_{200} ~ 40, where N_{200} is the number of red sequence galaxies in a cluster. As a byproduct of our analysis, we also obtain a constraint on the correlation coefficient between \ln Lx and \ln M at fixed richness, which is best expressed as a lower limit, r_{L,M|N} >= 0.85 (95% CL). This is the first observational constraint placed on a correlation coefficient involving two different cluster mass tracers. We use our results to produce a state of the art estimate of the halo mass function at z=0.23 -- the median redshift of the maxBCG cluster sample -- and find that it is consistent with the WMAP5 cosmology. Both the mass function data and its covariance matrix are presented.

astro-ph↗
arXiv2008

Revisiting the parametrization of Equation of State of Dark Energy via SNIa Data

In this paper, we revisit the parameterizations of the equation of state of dark energy and point out that comparing merely the $χ^2$ of different fittings may not be optimal for choosing the "best" parametrization. Another figure of merit for evaluating different parametrizations based on the area of the $w(z) - z$ band is proposed. In light of the analysis of some two-parameter parameterizations and models based on available SNIa data, the area of $w(z)-z$ band seems to be a good figure of merit, especially in the situation that the value of $χ^2_{\rm min}$ for different parametrizations are very close. Therefore, we argue that both the area of the $w(z)-z$ band and $χ^2_{\rm min}$ should be synthetically considered for choosing a better parametrization of dark energy in the future experiments.

astro-ph↗