arXiv subjects

Shantanu Desai

Publications and source records attributed to Shantanu Desai.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Search for Dark Matter Annihilation to gamma-rays from SPT-SZ selected Galaxy Clusters

We search for dark matter annihilation from galaxy clusters in the energy range from 1-300 GeV using nearly 16 years of Fermi-LAT data. For this purpose, we use 350 galaxy clusters selected from the 2500 $\rm{deg^2}$ SPT-SZ survey. We model the dark matter distribution using the NFW profile for the main halo along with the Einasto profile for the substructure. The largest signal is seen for the cluster SPT-CL J2021-5257 with a significance of around $3σ$. The best-fit dark matter mass and annihilation cross-section for this cluster are equal to $(60.0 \pm 11.8)$ GeV and $\langle σv \rangle= (6.0 \pm 0.6) \times 10^{-25} \rm{cm^3 s^{-1}}$ for the $\bar{b} b$ annihilation channel. However, this central estimate is in conflict with the limits on annihilation cross-section from dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and hence cannot be attributed to dark matter annihilation. Three other clusters show significance between $2-2.5σ$, whereas all the remaining clusters show null results. The most stringent 95\% c.l. upper limit for the WIMP annihilation cross-section among all the clusters is from SPT-CL J0455-4159, viz. $\langle σv \rangle = 6.44 \times 10^{-26} \text{cm}^3 \text{s}^{-1}$ for $m_χ = 10$ GeV and $b\bar{b}$ annihilation channel.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

The Gravitational Lensing Imprints of DES Y3 Superstructures on the CMB: A Matched Filtering Approach

$ $Low density cosmic voids gravitationally lens the cosmic microwave background (CMB), leaving a negative imprint on the CMB convergence $κ$. This effect provides insight into the distribution of matter within voids, and can also be used to study the growth of structure. We measure this lensing imprint by cross-correlating the Planck CMB lensing convergence map with voids identified in the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data set, covering approximately 4,200 deg$^2$ of the sky. We use two distinct void-finding algorithms: a 2D void-finder which operates on the projected galaxy density field in thin redshift shells, and a new code, Voxel, which operates on the full 3D map of galaxy positions. We employ an optimal matched filtering method for cross-correlation, using the MICE N-body simulation both to establish the template for the matched filter and to calibrate detection significances. Using the DES Y3 photometric luminous red galaxy sample, we measure $A_κ$, the amplitude of the observed lensing signal relative to the simulation template, obtaining $A_κ= 1.03 \pm 0.22$ ($4.6σ$ significance) for Voxel and $A_κ= 1.02 \pm 0.17$ ($5.9σ$ significance) for 2D voids, both consistent with $Λ$CDM expectations. We additionally invert the 2D void-finding process to identify superclusters in the projected density field, for which we measure $A_κ= 0.87 \pm 0.15$ ($5.9σ$ significance). The leading source of noise in our measurements is Planck noise, implying that future data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), South Pole Telescope (SPT) and CMB-S4 will increase sensitivity and allow for more precise measurements.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Search for MeV Gamma-ray emission from TeV bright red dwarfs with COMPTEL

The SHALON atmospheric Cherenkov telescope has detected very high energy gamma-ray emission at TeV energies from eight red dwarfs, namely, V388 Cas, V547 Cas, V780 Tau, V962 Tau, V1589 Cyg, GJ 1078, GJ 3684 and GL 851.1. Consequently, these red dwarfs have been suggested as sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In this work, we search for soft gamma-ray emission from these TeV bright red dwarfs between 0.75-30 MeV using archival data from the COMPTEL gamma-ray imaging telescope, as a follow-up to a similar search for GeV gamma-ray emission using the Fermi-LAT telescope. Although, prima-facie, we detect non-zero photon flux from three red dwarfs with high significance, these signals can attributed to contamination from nearby sources such as Crab and Cygnus, which are within the angular resolution of COMPTEL, and have been previously detected as very bright point sources at MeV energies. Therefore, we could not detect any statistically significant signal ($>3σ$) from any of these eight red dwarfs from 0.75-30 MeV. We then report the 95% confidence level upper limits on the differential photon flux (at 30 MeV), integral photon flux and integral energy flux for all of the eight red dwarfs. The integral energy flux limits range between $10^{-11}-10^{-10} \rm{ergs/cm^2/s}$.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

Enhanced Astronomical Source Classification with Integration of Attention Mechanisms and Vision Transformers

Accurate classification of celestial objects is essential for advancing our understanding of the universe. MargNet is a recently developed deep learning-based classifier applied to SDSS DR16 dataset to segregate stars, quasars, and compact galaxies using photometric data. MargNet utilizes a stacked architecture, combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image modelling and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for modelling photometric parameters. In this study, we propose enhancing MargNet's performance by incorporating attention mechanisms and Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models for processing image data. The attention mechanism allows the model to focus on relevant features and capture intricate patterns within images, effectively distinguishing between different classes of celestial objects. Additionally, we leverage ViTs, a transformer-based deep learning architecture renowned for exceptional performance in image classification tasks. We enhance the model's understanding of complex astronomical images by utilizing ViT's ability to capture global dependencies and contextual information. Our approach uses a curated dataset comprising 240,000 compact and 150,000 faint objects. The models learn classification directly from the data, minimizing human intervention. Furthermore, we explore ViT as a hybrid architecture that uses photometric features and images together as input to predict astronomical objects. Our results demonstrate that the proposed attention mechanism augmented CNN in MargNet marginally outperforms the traditional MargNet and the proposed ViT-based MargNet models. Additionally, the ViT-based hybrid model emerges as the most lightweight and easy-to-train model with classification accuracy similar to that of the best-performing attention-enhanced MargNet.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2024

A study of gamma-ray emission from OJ 287 using Fermi-LAT from 2015-2023

We search for gamma-ray emission from OJ287 in the energy range from 0.1-300 GeV during 2015-2023, in coincidence with an extensive observing campaign to monitor the optical flux variability and polarization, as discussed in arXiv:2311.02372. We present results for eight segments in the aforementioned period, with each segment corresponding to an observing season. We report non-zero gamma-ray flux (with $>10σ$ significance) for all the eight segments. The photon and energy flux observed during this period is $\sim 5.2 \times 10^{-8} \rm{ph~cm^{-2}~s^{-1}}$ and $2.75 \times 10^{-5} \rm{MeV~cm^{-2}~s^{-1}}$, respectively, while the SED can be fitted with a power law with a slope of $2.12 \pm 0.02$. The observed luminosity is between $10^{45}-10^{46}$ ergs/sec. Similar to previous works we find a hard cutoff in the gamma-ray spectrum at around 20 GeV. We do not observe any correlations between the peaks in the gamma ray light curves and corresponding optical light cuves in $I$ and $R$ bands, as well as the X-ray light curves from SWIFT between 0.3-10 keV.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

A test for the redshift dependence of $σ_8$ using $fσ_8$ measurements

We search for a redshift dependence of $σ_8^0$ using 23 growth rate measurements from redshift space distortions and peculiar velocity measurements as a consistency check of $Λ$CDM. For this purpose we use the dataset from arXiv:1806.10822 consisting of 22 measurements, which has been vetted for internal consistencies. Eighteen of these measurements have been obtained from the Gold-2017 sample, collated from multiple redshift space distortion surveys between 2009 and 2016, whereas the remaining four have been obtained from the eBOSS DR14 quasar survey. We also added one additional data point from the BOSS DR12 CMASS galaxy sample. We find that for this dataset the $σ_8^0$ values are consistent between the low redshift and high redshift samples using three different redshift cuts. This implies that the growth rate measurements are consistent with a constant $σ_8^0$ in accord with $Λ$CDM, assuming there are no uncontrolled systematics in this dataset.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Tully-Fisher Relation of Late-type Galaxies at $0.6 \leq z \leq 2.5$

We present a study of the stellar and baryonic Tully-Fisher relation within the redshift range of $0.6 \leq z \leq 2.5$ utilizing observations of \sfgs. This dataset, as explored in \citet{GS23}, comprises of disk-like galaxies spanning a stellar mass range of $8.89 \leq \log(M_{star} \ [\mathrm{M_\odot}]) \leq 11.5$, baryonic mass range of $9.0 \leq \log(M_{bar} [\mathrm{M_\odot}]) \leq 11.5$, and circular velocity range of $1.65 \leq \log(V_c \ [{\rm km/s}]) \leq 2.85$. Stellar masses of these objects are estimated using spectral energy distribution fitting techniques, while gas masses are determined via scaling relations. Circular velocities are directly derived from the Rotation Curves (RCs), after meticulously correcting for beam smearing and pressure support. Our analysis confirms that our sample adheres to the fundamental mass-size relations of galaxies and reflects the evolution of velocity dispersion in galaxies, in line with previous findings. This reaffirms the reliability of our photometric and kinematic parameters (i.e., $M_{star}$ and $V_c$), thereby enabling a comprehensive examination of the Tully-Fisher relation. To attain robust results, we employed a novel orthogonal likelihood fitting technique designed to minimize intrinsic scatter around the best-fit line, as required at \hz. For the STFR, we obtained a slope of $α=3.03\pm 0.25$, an offset of $β= 3.34\pm 0.53$, and an intrinsic scatter of $ζ_{int}=0.08$ dex. Correspondingly, the BTFR yielded $α=3.21\pm 0.28$, $β=3.16\pm 0.61$, and $ζ_{int}=0.09$ dex. Our findings suggest a subtle deviation in the stellar and baryonic Tully-Fisher relation with respect to local studies, which is most-likely due to the evolutionary processes governing disk formation.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

Comparison of $Λ$CDM and $R_h = ct$ with updated galaxy cluster $f_{gas}$ measurements using Bayesian inference

We use updated gas mass fraction measurements of 44 massive dynamically relaxed galaxy clusters collated in arXiv:2111.09343 to distinguish between the standard $Λ$CDM model and $R_h=ct$ universe. For this purpose, we use Bayesian model selection to compare the efficacy of both these cosmological models given the data. The gas mass fraction is modeled using both cosmology-dependent terms and also astrophysical parameters, which account for the variation with cluster mass and redshift. We used two different prior choices for some of the astrophysical parameters. We find a Bayes factors of 50 and 5 for $Λ$CDM as compared to $R_h=ct$ for these two prior choices. This implies that $Λ$CDM is favored compared to $R_h=ct$ with significance ranging from substantial to very strong.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Generalized Lomb-Scargle Analysis of 22 years of Super-Kamiokande solar $^8$B neutrino data

We apply the generalized Lomb-Scargle periodogram to 22 years data of solar $^{8}$B neutrino fluxes detected by Super-Kamiokande. The primary motivation of this work was to check if the sinusoidal modulation at a frequency of 9.43/year (with a period of 38 days), which we had found to be marginally significant with the first five years of Super-K data, persists, with the accumulated data. We use four different metrics for the calculation of significance. We do not find any evidence for periodicity at the aforementioned frequency or any other frequency with the updated data. Therefore the marginally detected periodicity at 9.43/year with the first five years of data was only a statistical fluctuation.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2024

Low-frequency pulse-jitter measurement with the uGMRT I : PSR J0437$-$4715

High-precision pulsar timing observations are limited in their accuracy by the jitter noise that appears in the arrival time of pulses. Therefore, it is important to systematically characterise the amplitude of the jitter noise and its variation with frequency. In this paper, we provide jitter measurements from low-frequency wideband observations of PSR J0437$-$4715 using data obtained as part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array experiment. We were able to detect jitter in both the 300 - 500 MHz and 1260 - 1460 MHz observations of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT). The former is the first jitter measurement for this pulsar below 700 MHz, and the latter is in good agreement with results from previous studies. In addition, at 300 - 500 MHz, we investigated the frequency dependence of the jitter by calculating the jitter for each sub-banded arrival time of pulses. We found that the jitter amplitude increases with frequency. This trend is opposite as compared to previous studies, indicating that there is a turnover at intermediate frequencies. It will be possible to investigate this in more detail with uGMRT observations at 550 - 750 MHz and future high sensitive wideband observations from next generation telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array. We also explored the effect of jitter on the high precision dispersion measure (DM) measurements derived from short duration observations. We find that even though the DM precision will be better at lower frequencies due to the smaller amplitude of jitter noise, it will limit the DM precision for high signal-to-noise observations, which are of short durations. This limitation can be overcome by integrating for a long enough duration optimised for a given pulsar.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

A pilot search for MeV gamma-ray emission from five galaxy clusters using archival COMPTEL data

We search for MeV gamma-ray emission between 0.75-30 MeV from five galaxy clusters, viz. Coma, VIRGO, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet, and El Gordo, using archival data from the COMPTEL telescope. For this purpose we use three search templates: point source, radial disk and radial Gaussian. We do not detect any signals from Coma, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet and El Gordo clusters with the 95\% c.l. photon energy flux limit $\sim 10^{-10} ~\rm{erg /cm^2/s} $. For VIRGO, we detect a non-zero signal between 0.92 to 1.63 MeV having marginal significance of about $2.5σ$, with the observed energy flux $ \sim 10^{-9}~\rm{ergs/cm^2/s}$. However, we do not confirm the previously reported evidence in literature for a gamma-ray line from Coma and VIRGO clusters between 5-7 MeV.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

A stacked search for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars

We carry out a stacked search for spatial coincidences between all the known radio pulsars and TeV neutrinos from the IceCube 10 year (2008-2018) muon track data, as a followup to our previous work on searching for spatial coincidences with individual pulsars. We consider three different weighting schemes to stack the contributions from each pulsar. We do not find a statistically significant excess using this method. We report the 95\% c.l. neutrino flux upper limit as a function of the neutrino energy. We have also made our analysis codes publicly available.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Search for GeV Gamma-Ray Emission from SPT-SZ selected Galaxy Clusters with 15 years of Fermi-LAT data

Galaxy clusters could produce gamma-rays from inverse Compton scattering of cosmic ray electrons or hadronic interactions of cosmic ray protons with the intracluster medium. It is still an open question on whether gamma-ray emission ($>$ GeV energies) has been detected from galaxy clusters. We carry out a systematic search for gamma-ray mission based on 300 galaxy clusters selected from the 2500 deg.$^2$ SPT-SZ survey after sorting them in descending order of $M_{500}/z^2$, using about 15 years of Fermi-LAT data in the energy range between 1-300 GeV. We were able to detect gamma-ray emission with significance of about $6.1σ$ from one cluster, viz SPT-CL J2012-5649. The estimated photon energy flux from this cluster is approximately equal to $1.3 \times 10^{-6}$ MeV cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$. The gamma-ray signal is observed between $1-10$ GeV with the best-fit spectral index equal to $-3.61 \pm 0.33$. However, since there are six radio galaxies spatially coincident with SPT-CL J2012-5649 within the Fermi-LAT PSF, we cannot rule out the possibility this signal could be caused by some of these radio galaxies. Six other SPT-SZ clusters show evidence for gamma-ray emission with significance between $3-5σ$. None of the remaining clusters show statistically significant evidence for gamma-ray emission.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Astrophysical and Cosmological Searches for Lorentz Invariance Violation

Lorentz invariance is one of the fundamental tenets of Special Relativity, and has been extensively tested with laboratory and astrophysical observations. However, many quantum gravity models and theories beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics predict a violation of Lorentz invariance at energies close to the Planck scale. This article reviews observational and experimental tests of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) with photons, neutrinos and gravitational waves. Most astrophysical tests of LIV using photons are based on searching for a correlation of the spectral lag data with redshift and energy. These have been primarily carried out using compact objects such as pulsars, Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), and Gamma-ray bursts (GRB). There have also been some claims for LIV from some of these spectral lag observations with GRBs, which however are in conflict with the most stringent limits obtained from other LIV searches. Searches have also been carried out using polarization measurements from GRBs and AGNs. For neutrinos, tests have been made using both astrophysical observations at MeV energies (from SN 1987A) as well as in the TeV-PeV energy range based on IceCube observations, atmospheric neutrinos, and long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. Cosmological tests of LIV entail looking for a constancy of the speed of light as a function of redshift using multiple observational probes, as well as looking for birefringence in Cosmic Microwave Background observations. This article will review all of these aforementioned observational tests of LIV, including results which are in conflict with each other.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2023

Application of Efron-Petrosian method to radio pulsar fluxes

We apply the Efron-Petrosian technique to radio fluxes of pulsars detected in the Parkes multi-beam survey to test the independence of luminosity and distance. For this dataset, we find that for four different distance exponents (ranging from 0.5 to 2), the flux thresholds at which the luminosity and distances are uncorrelated, correspond to very low $p$-values for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test between the truncated and untruncated datasets. This is due to the fact that the Parkes multi-beam survey is not sufficiently homogeneous to lend itself to a treatment by the Efron-Petrosian method. We then repeat the analysis after rendering the dataset more homogeneous by excluding the distant pulsars from this sample. We find that for this culled dataset, the flux is consistent with distance exponents of 1.5 and 2.0.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Multi-band Extension of the Wideband Timing Technique

The wideband timing technique enables the high-precision simultaneous estimation of pulsar Times of Arrival (ToAs) and Dispersion Measures (DMs) while effectively modeling frequency-dependent profile evolution. We present two novel independent methods that extend the standard wideband technique to handle simultaneous multi-band pulsar data incorporating profile evolution over a larger frequency span to estimate DMs and ToAs with enhanced precision. We implement the wideband likelihood using the libstempo python interface to perform wideband timing in the tempo2 framework. We present the application of these techniques to the dataset of fourteen millisecond pulsars observed simultaneously in Band 3 (300 - 500 MHz) and Band 5 (1260 - 1460 MHz) of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) with a large band gap of 760 MHz as a part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) campaign. We achieve increased ToA and DM precision and sub-microsecond root mean square post-fit timing residuals by combining simultaneous multi-band pulsar observations done in non-contiguous bands for the first time using our novel techniques.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2023

A meta-analysis of distance measurements to M87

We obtain the median, arithmetic mean, and the weighted mean-based central estimates for the distance to M87 using all the measurements collated in De Grijs et al (2020). We then reconstruct the error distribution for the residuals of the combined measurements and also splitting them based on the tracers used. We then checked for consistency with a Gaussian distribution and other symmetric distributions such as Cauchy, Laplacian, and Students-$t$ distributions. We find that when we analyze the combined data, the weighted mean-based estimates show a poor agreement with the Gaussian distribution, indicating that there are unaccounted systematic errors in some of the measurements. Therefore, the median-based estimate for the distance to M87 would be the most robust. This median-based distance modulus to M87 is given by $31.08 \pm 0.09$ mag and $31.07 \pm 0.09$ mag, with and without considering measurements categorized as "averages", respectively. This estimate agrees with the corresponding value obtained in DeGrijs et al (2020) to within $1σ$.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2023

Bayesian evidence for spectral lag transition due to Lorentz Invariance Violation for 32 Fermi/GBM Gamma-ray Bursts

We use the spectral lag data of 32 long GRBs detected by Fermi/GBM, which has been recently collated in Liu et al (2022) to quantify the statistical significance of a transition in the spectral lag data based on Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) (for both sub-luminal and super-luminal propagation) using Bayesian model selection. We use two different parametric functions to model the null hypothesis of only intrinsic emission: a smooth broken power law model (SBPL) (proposed in Liu et al) as well as a simple power law model, which has been widely used before in literature. We find that for sub-luminal propagation, when we use the SBPL model as the null hypothesis, five GRBs show ``decisive evidence'' based on Jeffreys' scale for linear LIV and quadratic LIV. When we use the simple power-law model as the null hypothesis, we find that 10 and GRBs show Bayesian ``decisive evidence'' for linear and quadratic LIV, respectively. However these results should not be construed as evidence for LIV, as they would be in conflict with the most stringent upper limits. When we did a test for super-luminal LIV, we find that only four and two GRBs show Bayesian ``decisive evidence'' for linear and quadratic LIV, respectively, assuming a simple power law for the intrinsic emission. When we use the SBPL model, one GRB shows Bayesian ``decisive evidence'' for linear and quadratic LIV. This underscores the importance of adequately modelling the intrinsic emission while obtaining constraints on LIV using spectral lags, since inadequate modelling could masquerade as a signature of LIV.

astro-ph.HE↗