arXiv subjects

P. Corcho-Caballero

Publications and source records attributed to P. Corcho-Caballero.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The MAGPI Survey: Evidence for Non-Universal Resolved Dust Attenuation Relations Beyond the Local Universe

We study the spatially resolved relation between dust attenuation ($A_V$) and star formation rate surface density ($Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$) in galaxies from the MAGPI survey ($0.25 < z < 0.42$). Using Balmer-decrement-based attenuation maps for 178 galaxies, we investigate whether the locally calibrated resolved $A_V$--$Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$ relation remains valid at intermediate redshift by comparing MAGPI with the local relation measured from MaNGA. We find a clear positive correlation between $A_V$ and $Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$ in MAGPI, with systematically higher attenuation than in MaNGA at fixed $Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$. After matching galaxies in stellar mass ($M_{*}$) and offset from the star-forming main sequence ($Δ$SFMS), MAGPI galaxies remain more attenuated than MaNGA galaxies at fixed $Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$. The attenuation excess is strongest for galaxies below the SFMS ($ΔA_V \sim 0.40$ mag), weaker for galaxies on the SFMS ($ΔA_V \sim 0.28$ mag), and minimal for galaxies above the SFMS ($ΔA_V \sim 0.07$ mag). The dependence of the offset on $Δ$SFMS suggests that nebular attenuation on kpc scales is regulated not only by local star formation activity, but also by the global evolutionary state of the host galaxy. Together, these results indicate that the resolved $A_V$--$Σ_{\mathrm{SFR}}$ relation is not universal, and that locally calibrated attenuation relations may not fully describe galaxies at intermediate redshift. This highlights the need for attenuation calibrations that account for galaxy population and redshift when interpreting spatially resolved galaxy properties.

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arXiv2026

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1): The evolution of the passive-density and morphology-density relations between $z=0.25$ and $z=1$

The extent to which the environment affects galaxy evolution has been under scrutiny by researchers for decades. With the first data from Euclid, we can begin to systematically study a wide range of environments and their effects as a function of redshift, using 63 deg2 of space-based data. In this paper, we present results from Euclid Q1, where we measured the passive-density and morphology-density relations in the redshift range z=0.25--1. We determined if a galaxy is passive using the specific star formation rate, and we classified the morphologies of galaxies using the Sersic index n and the u-r colours. We measured the local environmental density of each galaxy using the Nth-nearest neighbour method. We find that at a fixed stellar mass, the quenched fraction (the fraction of galaxies that have ceased star formation) increases with increasing local environmental density up to $z=1$. This result is indicative of the separability of the effects from the stellar mass and the environment. Similarly, at all redshifts in this work, the early-type galaxy fraction increases with increasing density at fixed stellar mass, meaning the environment also transforms the morphology of the galaxy independently of stellar mass, up to M_* < 10^10.8 Msol$. For M* > 10^10.8 Msol, almost all galaxies are early-types, with minimal impact from the environment. At z>0.75, the morphology depends mostly on stellar mass, with only low-mass galaxies being affected by the environment. Given that the morphology classifications use u-r colours, these are correlated to the star formation rate, and as such our morphology results should be taken with caution, yet future morphology classifications should help verify these results. To summarise, we successfully identify the passive-density and morphology-density relations at 0.25<z<1. Future Euclid data releases are key to confirm these trends at higher redshifts.

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arXiv2026

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1). Quenching precedes bulge formation in dense environments but follows it in the field

(Abridged) The bimodality between star-forming discs and quiescent spheroids requires the existence of two main processes: the galaxy quenching and the morphological transformation. In this paper, we aim to understand the link between these processes and their relation with the stellar mass of galaxies and their local environment. Taking advantage of the first data released by the Euclid Collaboration, covering more than 60 deg2 with space-based imaging and photometry, we analyse a mass-complete sample of nearly one million galaxies in the range 0.25 10^{9.5} M_\odot$. We divide the sample into four sub-populations of galaxies, based on their star-formation activity and morphology. We then analyse the physical properties of these populations and their relative abundances in the stellar mass vs. local density plane. Together with confirming the passivity-density relation and the morphology-density relation, we find that quiescent discy galaxies are more abundant in the low-mass regime of high-density environment. At the same time, star-forming bulge-dominated galaxies are more common in field regions, preferentially at high masses. Building on these results and interpreting them through comparison with simulations, we propose a scenario where the evolution of galaxies in the field significantly differs from that in higher-density environments. The morphological transformation in the majority of field galaxies takes place before the onset of quenching and is mainly driven by secular processes taking place within the main sequence, leading to the formation of star-forming bulge-dominated galaxies as intermediate-stage galaxies. Conversely, quenching of star formation precedes morphological transformation for most galaxies in higher-density environments. This causes the formation of quiescent disc-dominated galaxies before their transition into bulge-dominated ones.

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arXiv2025

Euclid preparation: LXXXI. The impact of nonparametric star formation histories on spatially resolved galaxy property estimation using synthetic Euclid images

We analyzed the spatially resolved and global star formation histories (SFHs) for a sample of 25 TNG50-SKIRT Atlas galaxies to assess the feasibility of reconstructing accurate SFHs from Euclid-like data. This study provides a proof of concept for extracting the spatially resolved SFHs of local galaxies with Euclid, highlighting the strengths and limitations of SFH modeling in the context of next-generation galaxy surveys. We used the spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting code Prospector to model both spatially resolved and global SFHs using parametric and nonparametric configurations. The input consisted of mock ultraviolet--near-infrared photometry derived from the TNG50 cosmological simulation and processed with the radiative transfer code SKIRT. We show that nonparametric SFHs provide a more effective approach to mitigating the outshining effect by recent star formation, offering improved accuracy in the determination of galaxy stellar properties. Also, we find that the nonparametric SFH model at resolved scales closely recovers the stellar mass formation times (within 0.1~dex) and the ground truth values from TNG50, with an absolute average bias of $0.03$~dex in stellar mass and $0.01$~dex in both specific star formation rate and mass-weighted age. In contrast, larger offsets are estimated for all stellar properties and formation times when using a simple $τ$-model SFH, at both resolved and global scales, highlighting its limitations. These results emphasize the critical role of nonparametric SFHs in both global and spatially resolved analyses, as they better capture the complex evolutionary pathways of galaxies and avoid the biases inherent in simple parametric models.

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arXiv2025

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1). A probabilistic classification of quenched galaxies

Investigating what drives the quenching of star formation in galaxies is key to understanding their evolution. The Euclid mission will provide rich data from optical to infrared wavelengths for millions of galaxies, and enable precise measurements of their star formation histories. Using the first Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1), we developed a probabilistic classification framework that combines the average specific star-formation rate inferred over two timescales ($10^8,10^9$ yr) to categorise galaxies as `ageing' (secularly evolving), `quenched' (recently halted star formation), or `retired' (dominated by old stars). Two classification methods were employed: a probabilistic approach, which integrates posterior distributions, and a model-driven method, which optimises sample purity and completeness using IllustrisTNG. At $z<0.1$ and $M_\ast \gtrsim 3\times10^{8}\,M_\odot$, we obtain Euclid class fractions of 68-72\%, 8-17\%, and 14-19\% for ageing, quenched, and retired populations, respectively. Ageing and retired galaxies dominate at the low- and high-mass end, respectively, while quenched galaxies surpass the retired fraction for $M_\ast \lesssim 10^{10}\,\rm M_\odot$. The evolution with redshift shows increasing and decreasing fractions of ageing and retired galaxies, respectively. More massive galaxies usually undergo quenching episodes at earlier times than to their low-mass counterparts. In terms of the mass-size-metallicity relation, ageing galaxies generally exhibit disc morphologies and low metallicities. Retired galaxies show compact structures and enhanced chemical enrichment, while quenched galaxies form an intermediate population that is more compact and chemically evolved than ageing systems. This work demonstrates Euclid's great potential for elucidating the physical nature of the quenching mechanisms that govern galaxy evolution.

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arXiv2025

ADARI: Visualizing the quality of VLT data

ADARI (Astronomical DAta Reporting Infrastructure) is a system designed for creating graphical reports of astronomical data so that the quality of these products can be assessed. It has been designed from the ground up to be backend-agnostic, meaning the same ADARI code can be sent to a web plotting API, or a code-based plotting API, with no alteration. Quick data inspection is an important feature in data reduction systems. The use cases range from quality control at the telescope, advance quality checks prior to delivering data to the scientists as well as data inspection for users running the pipelines at their home institutes. The goal of ADARI is to deliver the same experience and code for data visualization for all the environments, either running automatically in the Paranal Observatory environment or at the PI premises. ADARI contains a library that can be used to develop the creation of reports as well as a command line tool (genreport) to execute such reports. Most of the time the reports are generated as part of the execution of a data reduction workflow implemented with EDPS, the new ESO system for automatically organising data from ESO instruments and for running the reduction pipelines on them.

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arXiv2025

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1). A first view of the star-forming main sequence in the Euclid Deep Fields

The star-forming main sequence (SFMS) is a tight relation observed between stellar masses and star formation rates (SFR) in a population of galaxies. This relation is observed at different redshifts, in various morphological, and environmental domains, and is key to understanding the underlying relations between a galaxy budget of cold gas and its stellar content. Euclid Quick Data Release 1 (Q1) gives us the opportunity to investigate this fundamental relation in galaxy formation and evolution. We complement the Euclid release with public IRAC observations of the Euclid Deep Fields, improving the quality of recovered photometric redshifts, stellar masses, and SFRs, as is shown both with simulations and a comparison with available spectroscopic redshifts. From Q1 data alone, we recover more than $\sim 30\,\mathrm{k}$ galaxies with $\log_{10} (M_\ast/M_\odot) > 11$, giving a precise constraint of the SFMS at the high-mass end. We investigated the SFMS, in a redshift interval between $0.2$ and $3.0$, comparing our results with the existing literature and fitting them with a parameterisation taking into account the presence of a bending of the relation at the high-mass end, depending on the bending mass, $M_0$. We find good agreement with previous results in terms of $M_0$ values, and an increasing trend for the relation scatter at higher stellar masses. We also investigate the distribution of physical (e.g. dust absorption, $A_V$, and formation age) and morphological properties (e.g., Sérsic index and radius) in the SFR--stellar mass plane, and their relation with the SFMS. These results highlight the potential of Euclid in studying the fundamental scaling relations that regulate galaxy formation and evolution in anticipation of the forthcoming Data Release 1.

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arXiv2025

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1) -- Data release overview

The first Euclid Quick Data Release, Q1, comprises 63.1 sq deg of the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs) to nominal wide-survey depth. It encompasses visible and near-infrared space-based imaging and spectroscopic data, ground-based photometry in the u, g, r, i and z bands, as well as corresponding masks. Overall, Q1 contains about 30 million objects in three areas near the ecliptic poles around the EDF-North and EDF-South, as well as the EDF-Fornax field in the constellation of the same name. The purpose of this data release -- and its associated technical papers -- is twofold. First, it is meant to inform the community of the enormous potential of the Euclid survey data, to describe what is contained in these data, and to help prepare expectations for the forthcoming first major data release DR1. Second, it enables a wide range of initial scientific projects with wide-survey Euclid data, ranging from the early Universe to the Solar System. The Q1 data were processed with early versions of the processing pipelines, which already demonstrate good performance, with numerous improvements in implementation compared to pre-launch development. In this paper, we describe the sky areas released in Q1, the observations, a top-level view of the data processing of Euclid and associated external data, the Q1 photometric masks, and how to access the data. We also give an overview of initial scientific results obtained using the Q1 data set by Euclid Consortium scientists, and conclude with important caveats when using the data. As a complementary product, Q1 also contains observations of a star-forming area in Lynd's Dark Nebula 1641 in the Orion~A Cloud, observed for technical purposes during Euclid's performance-verification phase. This is a unique target, of a type not commonly found in Euclid's nominal sky survey.

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arXiv2025

Euclid: Finding strong gravitational lenses in the Early Release Observations using convolutional neural networks

The Early Release Observations (ERO) from Euclid have detected several new galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lenses, with the all-sky survey expected to find 170,000 new systems, greatly enhancing studies of dark matter, dark energy, and constraints on the cosmological parameters. As a first step, visual inspection of all galaxies in one of the ERO fields (Perseus) was carried out to identify candidate strong lensing systems and compared to the predictions from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, the entire ERO data set is too large for expert visual inspection. In this paper, we therefore extend the CNN analysis to the whole ERO data set, using different CNN architectures and methodologies. Using five CNN architectures, we identified 8,469 strong gravitational lens candidates from IE-band cutouts of 13 Euclid ERO fields, narrowing them to 97 through visual inspection, including 14 grade A and 31 grade B candidates. We present the spectroscopic confirmation of a strong gravitational lensing candidate, EUCLJ081705.61+702348.8. The foreground lensing galaxy, an early-type system at redshift z = 0.335, and the background source, a star-forming galaxy at redshift z = 1.475 with [O II] emission, are both identified. Lens modeling using the Euclid strong lens modeling pipeline reveals two distinct arcs in a lensing configuration, with an Einstein radius of 1.18 \pm 0.03 arcseconds, confirming the lensing nature of the system. These findings highlight the importance of a broad CNN search to efficiently reduce candidates, followed by visual inspection to eliminate false positives and achieve a high-purity sample of strong lenses in Euclid.

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arXiv2023

Characterizing the ELG luminosity functions in the nearby Universe

Nebular emission lines are powerful diagnostics for the physical processes at play in galaxy formation and evolution. Moreover, emission-line galaxies (ELGs) are one of the main targets of current and forthcoming spectroscopic cosmological surveys. We investigate the contributions to the line luminosity functions (LFs) of different galaxy populations in the local Universe, providing a benchmark for future surveys of earlier cosmic epochs. The large statistics of the observations from the SDSS DR7 Main galaxy sample and the MPA-JHU spectral catalogue enabled us to precisely measure the H$α$, H$β$, [OII], [OIII], and, for the first time, the [NII], and [SII] emission-line LFs over ~2.4 Gyrs in the low-z Universe, 0.02 10$^{-11}$/yr. When classifying ELGs using the BPT+WHAN diagrams, we find that 63.3 per cent are star forming, only 0.03 are passively evolving, and 1.3 have nuclear activity (Seyfert). The rest are low-ionization narrow emission-line regions (LINERs) and composite ELGs. We found that a Saunders function is the most appropriate to describe all of the emission-line LFs, both observed and dust-extinction-corrected. They are dominated by star-forming regions, except for the bright end of the [OIII] and [NII] LFs (i.e. L[NII]>10$^{42}$ erg/s, L[OIII]>10$^{43}$ erg/s), where the contribution of Seyfert galaxies is not negligible.

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arXiv2022

Polynomial expansion of the star formation history in galaxies

Context. There are typically two different approaches to inferring the mass formation history (MFH) of a given galaxy from its luminosity in different bands. Non-parametric methods are known for their flexibility and accuracy, while parametric models are more computationally efficient. Aims. In this work we propose an alternative, based on a polynomial expansion around the present time, that combines the advantages of both techniques. Methods. In our approach, the MFH is decomposed through an orthonormal basis of N polynomials in lookback time. To test the proposed framework, synthetic observations are generated from models based on common analytical approximations (exponential, delayed-$τ$, and Gaussian star formation histories), as well as cosmological simulations for the Illustris-TNG suite. A normalized distance is used to measure the quality of the fit, and the input MFH is compared with the polynomial reconstructions both at the present time and through cosmic evolution. Our polynomial expansion is also compared with widely used parametric and non-parametric methods such as CIGALE anda PROSPECTOR. Results. The observed luminosities are reproduced with an accuracy of around 10 per cent for a constant star formation rate (N=1) and better for higher-order polynomials. Our method provides good results on the reconstruction of the total stellar mass, the star formation rate, and even its first derivative for smooth star formation histories, but it has difficulties in reproducing variations on short timescales and/or star formation histories that peak at the earliest times of the Universe. Conclusions. The polynomial expansion appears to be a promising alternative to other analytical functions used in parametric methods, combining both speed and flexibility.

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arXiv2020

A single galaxy population? statistical evidence that the Star-Forming Main Sequence might be the tip of the iceberg

According to their specific star formation rate (sSFR), galaxies are often divided into `star-forming' and `passive' populations. It is argued that the former define a narrow `Main Sequence of Star-Forming Galaxies' (MSSF) of the form $\sSFR(\Mstar)$, whereas `passive' galaxies feature negligible levels of star formation activity. Here we use data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey at $z<0.1$ to constrain the conditional probability of the specific star formation rate at a given stellar mass. We show that the whole population of galaxies in the local Universe is consistent with a simple probability distribution with only one maximum (roughly corresponding to the MSSF) and relatively shallow power-law tails that fully account for the `passive' population. We compare the quality of the fits provided by such unimodal ansatz against those coming from a double log-normal fit (illustrating the bimodal paradigm), finding that both descriptions are roughly equally compatible with the current data. In addition, we study the physical interpretation of the bidimensional distribution across the $M_*-\sSFR$ plane and discuss potential implications from a theoretical and observational point of view. We also investigate correlations with metallicity, morphology and environment, highlighting the need to consider at least an additional parameter in order to fully specify the physical state of a galaxy.

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