arXiv subjects

John K. Parejko

Publications and source records attributed to John K. Parejko.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Crowded Field Photometry with Rubin: Exploring 47 Tucanae with Data Preview 1

We analyze imaging from Data Preview 1 of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory to explore the performance of early LSST pipelines in the 47 Tucanae field. The coadd-\texttt{object} catalog demonstrates the depth and precision possible with Rubin, recovering well-defined color magnitude diagrams for 47 Tuc Small Magellanic Cloud. Unfortunately, the existing pipelines fail to recover sources within $\sim$28 pc of the cluster center, due to the extreme source density. Using Rubin's forced photometry on stars identified via Difference Imaging, we can recover sources down to $\sim$14 pc from the cluster center, and find 14744 potential cluster members with this extended dataset. While this forced photometry has significant systematics, our analysis showcases the potential for detailed structural studies of crowded fields with the Rubin Observatory.

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arXiv2025

Tuning the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Observing Strategy for Solar System Science: Incremental Templates in Year 1

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is due to commence the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the end of 2025. To detect transient/variable sources and identify solar system objects (SSOs), the processing pipelines require templates of the static sky to perform difference imaging. During the first year of the LSST, templates must be generated as the survey progresses, otherwise SSOs cannot be discovered nightly. The incremental template generation strategy has not been finalized; therefore, we use the Metric Analysis Framework (MAF) and a simulation of the survey cadence (one_snap_v4.0_10yrs}) to explore template generation in Year 1. We have assessed the effects of generating templates over timescales of days-weeks, when at least four images of sufficient quality are available for $\geq90\%$ of the visit. We predict that SSO discoveries will begin $\sim$2-3 months after the start of the survey. We find that the ability of the LSST to discover SSOs in real-time is reduced in Year 1. This is especially true for detections in areas of the sky that receive fewer visits, such as the North Ecliptic Spur (NES), and in less commonly used filters, such as the $u$ and $g$-bands. The lack of templates in the NES dominates the loss of real-time SSO discoveries; across the whole sky the MAF Main-Belt asteroid (MBA) discovery metric decreases by up to $63\%$ compared to the baseline observing strategy, whereas the metric decreases by up to $79\%$ for MBAs in the NES alone.

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arXiv2020

Dimensionality Reduction of SDSS Spectra with Variational Autoencoders

High resolution galaxy spectra contain much information about galactic physics, but the high dimensionality of these spectra makes it difficult to fully utilize the information they contain. We apply variational autoencoders (VAEs), a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique, to a sample of spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In contrast to Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a widely used technique, VAEs can capture non-linear relationships between latent parameters and the data. We find that a VAE can reconstruct the SDSS spectra well with only six latent parameters, outperforming PCA with the same number of components. Different galaxy classes are naturally separated in this latent space, without class labels having been given to the VAE. The VAE latent space is interpretable because the VAE can be used to make synthetic spectra at any point in latent space. For example, making synthetic spectra along tracks in latent space yields sequences of realistic spectra that interpolate between two different types of galaxies. Using the latent space to find outliers may yield interesting spectra: in our small sample, we immediately find unusual data artifacts and stars misclassified as galaxies. In this exploratory work, we show that VAEs create compact, interpretable latent spaces that capture non-linear features of the data. While a VAE takes substantial time to train (~1 day for 48000 spectra), once trained, VAEs can enable the fast exploration of large astronomical data sets.

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arXiv2018

An Overview of the LSST Image Processing Pipelines

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an ambitious astronomical survey with a similarly ambitious Data Management component. Data Management for LSST includes processing on both nightly and yearly cadences to generate transient alerts, deep catalogs of the static sky, and forced photometry light-curves for billions of objects at hundreds of epochs, spanning at least a decade. The algorithms running in these pipelines are individually sophisticated and interact in subtle ways. This paper provides an overview of those pipelines, focusing more on those interactions than the details of any individual algorithm.

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arXiv2016

The XMM Cluster Survey: The Halo Occupation Number of BOSS galaxies in X-ray clusters

We present a direct measurement of the mean halo occupation distribution (HOD) of galaxies taken from the eleventh data release (DR11) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The HOD of BOSS low-redshift (LOWZ: $0.2 < z < 0.4$) and Constant-Mass (CMASS: $0.43 <z <0.7$) galaxies is inferred via their association with the dark-matter halos of 174 X-ray-selected galaxy clusters drawn from the XMM Cluster Survey (XCS). Halo masses are determined for each galaxy cluster based on X-ray temperature measurements, and range between ${\rm log_{10}} (M_{180}/M_{\odot}) = 13-15$. Our directly measured HODs are consistent with the HOD-model fits inferred via the galaxy-clustering analyses of Parejko et al. for the BOSS LOWZ sample and White et al. for the BOSS CMASS sample. Under the simplifying assumption that the other parameters that describe the HOD hold the values measured by these authors, we have determined a best-fit alpha-index of 0.91$\pm$0.08 and $1.27^{+0.03}_{-0.04}$ for the CMASS and LOWZ HOD, respectively. These alpha-index values are consistent with those measured by White et al. and Parejko et al. In summary, our study provides independent support for the HOD models assumed during the development of the BOSS mock-galaxy catalogues that have subsequently been used to derive BOSS cosmological constraints.

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arXiv2016

The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey

Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) is an optical fiber-bundle integral-field unit (IFU) spectroscopic survey that is one of three core programs in the fourth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV). With a spectral coverage of 3622 - 10,354 Angstroms and an average footprint of ~ 500 arcsec^2 per IFU the scientific data products derived from MaNGA will permit exploration of the internal structure of a statistically large sample of 10,000 low redshift galaxies in unprecedented detail. Comprising 174 individually pluggable science and calibration IFUs with a near-constant data stream, MaNGA is expected to obtain ~ 100 million raw-frame spectra and ~ 10 million reduced galaxy spectra over the six-year lifetime of the survey. In this contribution, we describe the MaNGA Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP) algorithms and centralized metadata framework that produces sky-subtracted, spectrophotometrically calibrated spectra and rectified 3-D data cubes that combine individual dithered observations. For the 1390 galaxy data cubes released in Summer 2016 as part of SDSS-IV Data Release 13 (DR13), we demonstrate that the MaNGA data have nearly Poisson-limited sky subtraction shortward of ~ 8500 Angstroms and reach a typical 10-sigma limiting continuum surface brightness mu = 23.5 AB/arcsec^2 in a five arcsec diameter aperture in the g band. The wavelength calibration of the MaNGA data is accurate to 5 km/s rms, with a median spatial resolution of 2.54 arcsec FWHM (1.8 kpc at the median redshift of 0.037) and a median spectral resolution of sigma = 72 km/s.

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arXiv2016

SDSS-IV MaNGA IFS Galaxy Survey --- Survey Design, Execution, and Initial Data Quality

The MaNGA Survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) is one of three core programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV. It is obtaining integral field spectroscopy (IFS) for 10K nearby galaxies at a spectral resolution of R~2000 from 3,622-10,354A. The design of the survey is driven by a set of science requirements on the precision of estimates of the following properties: star formation rate surface density, gas metallicity, stellar population age, metallicity, and abundance ratio, and their gradients; stellar and gas kinematics; and enclosed gravitational mass as a function of radius. We describe how these science requirements set the depth of the observations and dictate sample selection. The majority of targeted galaxies are selected to ensure uniform spatial coverage in units of effective radius (Re) while maximizing spatial resolution. About 2/3 of the sample is covered out to 1.5Re (Primary sample), and 1/3 of the sample is covered to 2.5Re (Secondary sample). We describe the survey execution with details that would be useful in the design of similar future surveys. We also present statistics on the achieved data quality, specifically, the point spread function, sampling uniformity, spectral resolution, sky subtraction, and flux calibration. For our Primary sample, the median r-band signal-to-noise ratio is ~73 per 1.4A pixel for spectra stacked between 1-1.5 Re. Measurements of various galaxy properties from the first year data show that we are meeting or exceeding the defined requirements for the majority of our science goals.

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arXiv2016

The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Overview and Early Data

The Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) will conduct novel cosmological observations using the BOSS spectrograph at Apache Point Observatory. Observations will be simultaneous with the Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) designed for variability studies and the Spectroscopic Identification of eROSITA Sources (SPIDERS) program designed for studies of X-ray sources. eBOSS will use four different tracers to measure the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). Using more than 250,000 new, spectroscopically confirmed luminous red galaxies at a median redshift z=0.72, we project that eBOSS will yield measurements of $d_A(z)$ to an accuracy of 1.2% and measurements of H(z) to 2.1% when combined with the z>0.6 sample of BOSS galaxies. With ~195,000 new emission line galaxy redshifts, we expect BAO measurements of $d_A(z)$ to an accuracy of 3.1% and H(z) to 4.7% at an effective redshift of z= 0.87. A sample of more than 500,000 spectroscopically-confirmed quasars will provide the first BAO distance measurements over the redshift range 0.9 2.1; these new data will enhance the precision of $d_A(z)$ and H(z) by a factor of 1.44 relative to BOSS. Furthermore, eBOSS will provide improved tests of General Relativity on cosmological scales through redshift-space distortion measurements, improved tests for non-Gaussianity in the primordial density field, and new constraints on the summed mass of all neutrino species. Here, we provide an overview of the cosmological goals, spectroscopic target sample, demonstration of spectral quality from early data, and projected cosmological constraints from eBOSS.

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arXiv2014

Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory

We present an overview of a new integral field spectroscopic survey called MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory), one of three core programs in the fourth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) that began on 2014 July 1. MaNGA will investigate the internal kinematic structure and composition of gas and stars in an unprecedented sample of 10,000 nearby galaxies. We summarize essential characteristics of the instrument and survey design in the context of MaNGA's key science goals and present prototype observations to demonstrate MaNGA's scientific potential. MaNGA employs dithered observations with 17 fiber-bundle integral field units that vary in diameter from 12" (19 fibers) to 32" (127 fibers). Two dual-channel spectrographs provide simultaneous wavelength coverage over 3600-10300 A at R~2000. With a typical integration time of 3 hr, MaNGA reaches a target r-band signal-to-noise ratio of 4-8 (per A, per 2" fiber) at 23 AB mag per sq. arcsec, which is typical for the outskirts of MaNGA galaxies. Targets are selected with stellar mass greater than 1e9 Msun using SDSS-I redshifts and i-band luminosity to achieve uniform radial coverage in terms of the effective radius, an approximately flat distribution in stellar mass, and a sample spanning a wide range of environments. Analysis of our prototype observations demonstrates MaNGA's ability to probe gas ionization, shed light on recent star formation and quenching, enable dynamical modeling, decompose constituent components, and map the composition of stellar populations. MaNGA's spatially resolved spectra will enable an unprecedented study of the astrophysics of nearby galaxies in the coming 6 yr.

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arXiv2014

The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: galaxy clustering measurements in the low redshift sample of Data Release 11

We present the distance measurement to z = 0.32 using the 11th data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Survey (BOSS). We use 313,780 galaxies of the low-redshift (LOWZ) sample over 7,341 square-degrees to compute $D_V = (1264 \pm 25)(r_d/r_{d,fid})$ - a sub 2% measurement - using the baryon acoustic feature measured in the galaxy two-point correlation function and power-spectrum. We compare our results to those obtained in DR10. We study observational systematics in the LOWZ sample and quantify potential effects due to photometric offsets between the northern and southern Galactic caps. We find the sample to be robust to all systematic effects found to impact on the targeting of higher-redshift BOSS galaxies, and that the observed north-south tensions can be explained by either limitations in photometric calibration or by sample variance, and have no impact on our final result. Our measurement, combined with the baryonic acoustic scale at z = 0.57, is used in Anderson et al. (2013a) to constrain cosmological parameters.

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arXiv2013

The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Luminosity and Color Dependence and Redshift Evolution

We measure the luminosity and color dependence and the redshift evolution of galaxy clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Ninth Data Release. We focus on the projected two-point correlation function (2PCF) of subsets of its CMASS sample, which includes about 260,000 galaxies over ~3,300 sq. deg in the redshift range 0.43<z<0.7. To minimize the selection effect on galaxy clustering, we construct well-defined luminosity and color subsamples by carefully accounting for the CMASS galaxy selection cuts. The 2PCF of the whole CMASS sample, if approximated by a power-law, has a correlation length of r_0=7.93\pm0.06Mpc/h and an index of γ=1.85\pm0.01. Clear dependences on galaxy luminosity and color are found for the projected 2PCF in all redshift bins, with more luminous and redder galaxies generally exhibiting stronger clustering and steeper 2PCF. The color dependence is also clearly seen for galaxies within the red sequence, consistent with the behavior of SDSS-II main sample galaxies at lower redshifts. At a given luminosity (k+e corrected), no significant evolution of the projected 2PCFs with redshift is detected for red sequence galaxies. We also construct galaxy samples of fixed number density at different redshifts, using redshift-dependent magnitude thresholds. The clustering of these galaxies in the CMASS redshift range is found to be consistent with that predicted by passive evolution. Our measurements of the luminosity and color dependence and redshift evolution of galaxy clustering will allow for detailed modeling of the relation between galaxies and dark matter halos and new constraints on galaxy formation and evolution.

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arXiv2012

Cross-Correlation of SDSS DR7 Quasars and DR10 BOSS Galaxies: The Weak Luminosity Dependence of Quasar Clustering at z~0.5

We present the measurement of the two-point cross-correlation function (CCF) of 8,198 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) quasars and 349,608 DR10 CMASS galaxies from the Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) at redshift ~0.5 (0.3 =0.53 from the CCF measurements. This linear bias corresponds to a characteristic host halo mass of ~4x10^12 M_sun/h, compared to ~10^13 M_sun/h characteristic host halo mass for CMASS galaxies. We divide the quasar sample in luminosity and constrain the luminosity dependence of quasar bias to be db_Q/dlogL=0.20+-0.34 or 0.11+-0.32 (depending on different luminosity divisions) for quasar luminosities -23.5>M_i(z=2)>-25.5, implying a weak luminosity dependence of quasar clustering for the bright end of the quasar population at ~0.5. We compare our measurements with theoretical predictions, Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) models and mock catalogs. These comparisons suggest quasars reside in a broad range of host halos, and the host halo mass distributions significantly overlap with each other for quasars at different luminosities, implying a poor correlation between halo mass and instantaneous quasar luminosity. We also find that the quasar HOD parameterization is largely degenerate such that different HODs can reproduce the CCF equally well, but with different outcomes such as the satellite fraction and host halo mass distribution. These results highlight the limitations and ambiguities in modeling the distribution of quasars with the standard HOD approach and the need for additional information in populating quasars in dark matter halos with HOD. [Abridged]

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arXiv2012

The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: the low redshift sample

We report on the small scale (0.5<r<40h^-1 Mpc) clustering of 78895 massive (M*~10^11.3M_sun) galaxies at 0.2<z<0.4 from the first two years of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), to be released as part of SDSS Data Release 9 (DR9). We describe the sample selection, basic properties of the galaxies, and caveats for working with the data. We calculate the real- and redshift-space two-point correlation functions of these galaxies, fit these measurements using Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) modeling within dark matter cosmological simulations, and estimate the errors using mock catalogs. These galaxies lie in massive halos, with a mean halo mass of 5.2x10^13 h^-1 M_sun, a large scale bias of ~2.0, and a satellite fraction of 12+/-2%. Thus, these galaxies occupy halos with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II LRG sample.

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arXiv2009

Training the Next Generation of Astronomers

While both society and astronomy have evolved greatly over the past fifty years, the academic institutions and incentives that shape our field have remained largely stagnant. As a result, the astronomical community is faced with several major challenges, including: (1) the training that we provide does not align with the skills that future astronomers will need, (2) the postdoctoral phase is becoming increasingly demanding and demoralizing, and (3) our jobs are increasingly unfriendly to families with children. Solving these problems will require conscious engineering of our profession. Fortunately, this Decadal Review offers the opportunity to revise outmoded practices to be more effective and equitable. The highest priority of the Subcommittee on the State of the Profession should be to recommend specific, funded activities that will ensure the field meets the challenges we describe.

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arXiv2009

Eight-Dimensional Mid-Infrared/Optical Bayesian Quasar Selection

We explore the multidimensional, multiwavelength selection of quasars from mid-IR (MIR) plus optical data, specifically from Spitzer-IRAC and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We apply modern statistical techniques to combined Spitzer MIR and SDSS optical data, allowing up to 8-D color selection of quasars. Using a Bayesian selection method, we catalog 5546 quasar candidates to an 8.0 um depth of 56 uJy over an area of ~24 sq. deg; ~70% of these candidates are not identified by applying the same Bayesian algorithm to 4-color SDSS optical data alone. Our selection recovers 97.7% of known type 1 quasars in this area and greatly improves the effectiveness of identifying 3.5<z<5 quasars. Even using only the two shortest wavelength IRAC bandpasses, it is possible to use our Bayesian techniques to select quasars with 97% completeness and as little as 10% contamination. This sample has a photometric redshift accuracy of 93.6% (Delta Z +/-0.3), remaining roughly constant when the two reddest MIR bands are excluded. While our methods are designed to find type 1 (unobscured) quasars, as many as 1200 of the objects are type 2 (obscured) quasar candidates. Coupling deep optical imaging data with deep mid-IR data could enable selection of quasars in significant numbers past the peak of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) to at least z~4. Such a sample would constrain the shape of the QLF and enable quasar clustering studies over the largest range of redshift and luminosity to date, yielding significant gains in our understanding of quasars and the evolution of galaxies.

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arXiv2007

Source Matching in the SDSS and RASS: Which Galaxies are Really X-ray Sources?

The current view of galaxy formation holds that all massive galaxies harbor a massive black hole at their center, but that these black holes are not always in an actively accreting phase. X-ray emission is often used to identify accreting sources, but for galaxies that are not harboring quasars (low-luminosity active galaxies), the X-ray flux may be weak, or obscured by dust. To aid in the understanding of weakly accreting black holes in the local universe, a large sample of galaxies with X-ray detections is needed. We cross-match the ROSAT All Sky Survey (RASS) with galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4 (SDSS DR4) to create such a sample. Because of the high SDSS source density and large RASS positional errors, the cross-matched catalog is highly contaminated by random associations. We investigate the overlap of these surveys and provide a statistical test of the validity of RASS-SDSS galaxy cross-matches. SDSS quasars provide a test of our cross-match validation scheme, as they have a very high fraction of true RASS matches. We find that the number of true matches between the SDSS main galaxy sample and the RASS is highly dependent on the optical spectral classification of the galaxy; essentially no star-forming galaxies are detected, while more than 0.6% of narrow-line Seyferts are detected in the RASS. Also, galaxies with ambiguous optical classification have a surprisingly high RASS detection fraction. This allows us to further constrain the SEDs of low-luminosity active galaxies. Our technique is quite general, and can be applied to any cross-matching between surveys with well-understood positional errors.

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