arXiv subjects

Shiyin Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Shiyin Shen.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Mock X-ray observations of hot gas with L-Galaxies semi-analytic models of galaxy formation

We create mock X-ray observations of hot gas in galaxy clusters with a new extension of L-Galaxies semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, which includes the radial distribution of hot gas in each halo. Based on the model outputs, we first build some mock light cones, then generate mock spectra with SOXS package and derive the mock images in the light cones. Using the mock data, we simulate the mock X-ray spectra for ROSAT all-sky survey, and compare the mock spectra with the observational results. Then, we consider the design parameters of HUBS mission and simulate the observation of the halo hot gas for HUBS as an important application of our mock work. We find: (1) Our mock data match the observations by current X-ray telescopes. (2) The survey of hot baryons in resolved clusters by HUBS is effective below redshift 0.5, and the observations of the emission lines in point-like sources at z>0.5 by HUBS help us understand the hot baryons in the early universe. (3) By taking the advantage of the large simulation box and flexibility in semi-analytic models, our mock X-ray observations provide the opportunity to make target selection and observation strategies for forthcoming X-ray facilities.

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arXiv2023

The Chocolate Chip Cookie Model: dust-to-metal ratio of HII regions

Using a sample of face-on star-forming galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we statistically derive the typical optical depth $τ_{\rm{cl}}$ of individual HII regions based on the ``Chocolate Chip Cookie" model of Lu2022. By binning galaxies into stellar mass and gas-phase metallicity bins and interpreting $τ_{\rm{cl}}$ as the dust to gas ratio (DGR) of HII regions, we further investigate the correlations among DGR and stellar mass, gas-phase metallicity respectively. We find that DGR increases monotonically with the stellar mass of galaxies. At a given stellar mass, DGR shows a linear correlation with the gas-phase metallicity, which implies a constant dust to metal ratio (DTM) of galaxies at a given stellar mass. These results adequately indicate that the DTM of galaxies is simply a function of their stellar masses. In terms of gas-phase metallicity, because of the mass-metalliciy relation, DTM increases with increasing metallicity with a power-law index 1.45 in the low metallicity region, while remains constant at the high metallicity end.

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arXiv2022

The hot gas distribution, X-ray luminosity and baryon budget in the L-Galaxies semi-analytic model of galaxy formation

Hot ionized gas is important in the baryon cycle of galaxies and contributes the majority of their ``missing baryons''. Until now, most semi-analytic models of galaxy formation have paid little attention to hot gaseous haloes and their X-ray emission. In this paper, we adopt the one-dimensional model from Sharma et al. instead of the isothermal sphere to describe the radial distribution of hot gas in the L-Galaxies semi-analytic model. The hot gas halo can be divided into two parts according to the ratio of the local thermal instability time-scale and the free-fall time-scale: a cool core with $t_{\rm TI}/t_{\rm ff}=10$ and a stable outer halo with $t_{\rm TI}/t_{\rm ff}>10$. We update the prescriptions of cooling, feedback and stripping based on the new hot gas profiles, and then reproduce several X-ray observational results, like the radial profiles of hot gas density, and the scaling relations of X-ray luminosity and temperature. We find: (1) Consistent with observations, flatter density profiles in halo centers produce lower X-ray emission than an isothermal sphere; (2) Cool core regions prone to precipitation have higher gas temperature than the virial temperature, and a larger $T_{\rm X}/T_{\rm 200}$ ratio in smaller haloes leads to a steeper slope in the $L_{\rm X}-T_{\rm X}$ relation; (3) The ionized gas in the unbounded reservoir and low temperature intergalactic gas in low mass haloes could be the main components of the halo ``missing baryons''. Our model outputs can predict the observations of hot gas in the nearby universe and produce mock surveys of baryons probed by future X-ray telescopes.

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arXiv2022

The Chocolate Chip Cookie Model: Dust Geometry of Milky-Way like Disk Galaxies

We present a new two-component dust geometry model, the \textit{Chocolate Chip Cookie} model, where the clumpy nebular regions are embedded in a diffuse stellar/ISM disk, like chocolate chips in a cookie. By approximating the binomial distribution of the clumpy nebular regions with a continuous Gaussian distribution and omitting the dust scattering effect, our model solves the dust attenuation process for both the emission lines and stellar continua via analytical approaches. Our Chocolate Chip Cookie model successfully fits the inclination dependence of both the effective dust reddening of the stellar components derived from stellar population synthesis and that of the emission lines characterized by the Balmer decrement for a large sample of Milky-Way like disk galaxies selected from the main galaxy sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our model shows that the clumpy nebular disk is about 0.55 times thinner and 1.6 times larger than the stellar disk for MW-like galaxies, whereas each clumpy region has a typical optical depth $τ_{\rm{cl,V}} \sim 0.5$ in $V$ band. After considering the aperture effect, our model prediction on the inclination dependence of dust attenuation is also consistent with observations. Not only that, in our model, the dust attenuation curve of the stellar population naturally depends on inclination and its median case is consistent with the classical Calzetti law. Since the modelling constraints are from the optical wavelengths, our model is unaffected by the optically thick dust component, which however could bias the model's prediction of the infrared emissions.

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arXiv2022

MaNGA 8313-1901: gas accretion observed in a blue compact dwarf galaxy?

Gas accretion is an important process in the evolution of galaxies, but it has limited direct observational evidences. In this paper, we report the detection of a possible ongoing gas accretion event in a Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxy, MaNGA 8313-1901, observed by the Mapping Nearby Galaxies and Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) program. This galaxy has a distinct off-centered blue clump to the northeast (the NE clump) that shows low metallicity and enhanced star-formation. The kinematics of the gas in the NE clump also seems to be detached from the host BCD galaxy. Together with the metallicity drop of the NE clump, it suggests that the NE clump likely has an external origin, such as the gas accretion or galaxy interaction, rather than an internal origin, such as an \hii~complex in the disk. After removing the underlying host component, we find that the spectrum of the "pure" clump can match very well with a modeled spectrum containing a stellar population of the young stars ($\le 7$ Myr) only. This may imply that the galaxy is experiencing an accretion of cold gas, instead of a merger event involving galaxies with significant pre-existing old stars. We also find signs of another clump (the SW clump) at the south-west corner of the host galaxy, and the two clumps may share the same origin of gas accretion.

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arXiv2022

qrpca: A Package for Fast Principal Component Analysis with GPU Acceleration

We present qrpca, a fast and scalable QR-decomposition principal component analysis package. The software, written in both R and python languages, makes use of torch for internal matrix computations, and enables GPU acceleration, when available. qrpca provides similar functionalities to prcomp (R) and sklearn (python) packages respectively. A benchmark test shows that qrpca can achieve computational speeds 10-20 $\times$ faster for large dimensional matrices than default implementations, and is at least twice as fast for a standard decomposition of spectral data cubes. The qrpca source code is made freely available to the community.

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arXiv2022

The Compactness of Galaxy Groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We use an updated version of the halo-based galaxy group catalog of Yang et al., and take the surface brightness of the galaxy group ($μ_{\rm lim}$) based on projected positions and luminosities of galaxy members as a compactness proxy to divide groups into sub-systems with different compactness. By comparing various properties, including galaxy conditional luminosity function, stellar population, active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity, and X-ray luminosity of the intra-cluster medium of carefully controlled high (HC) and low compactness (LC) group samples, we find that the group compactness plays an essential role in characterizing the detailed physical properties of the group themselves and their group members, especially for low mass groups with $M_h \lesssim 10^{13.5}h^{-1}M_{\odot}$. We find that the low-mass HC groups have a systematically lower magnitude gap $Δm_{12}$ and X-ray luminosity than their LC counterparts, indicating that the HC groups are probably in the early stage of group merging. On the other hand, a higher fraction of passive galaxies is found in the HC group, which however is a result of systematically smaller halo-centric distance distribution of their satellite population. After controlling of both $M_h$ and halo-centric distance, we do not find any differences for both the quenching faction and AGN activity of the member galaxies between the HC and LC groups. Therefore, we conclude that the halo quenching effect, which result in the halo-centric dependence of galaxy population, is a faster process compared to the dynamical relaxed time-scale of galaxy groups.

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arXiv2021

An IFU View of the Active Galactic Nuclei in MaNGA Galaxy Pairs

The role of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) during galaxy interactions and how they influence the star formation in the system are still under debate. We use a sample of 1156 galaxies in galaxy pairs or mergers (hereafter `pairs') from the MaNGA survey. This pair sample is selected by the velocity offset, projected separation, and morphology, and is further classified into four cases along the merger sequence based on morphological signatures. We then identify a total of 61 (5.5%) AGNs in pairs based on the emission-line diagnostics. No evolution of the AGN fraction is found, either along the merger sequence or compared to isolated galaxies (5.0%). We observe a higher fraction of passive galaxies in galaxy pairs, especially in the pre-merging cases, and associate the higher fraction to their environmental dependence. The isolated AGN and AGN in pairs show similar distributions in their global stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), and central [OIII] surface brightness. AGNs in pairs show radial profiles of increasing specific SFR and declining Dn4000 from center to outskirts, and no significant difference from the isolated AGNs. This is clearly different from star-forming galaxies (SFGs) in our pair sample, which show enhanced central star formation, as reported before. AGNs in pairs have lower Balmer decrements at outer regions, possibly indicating less dust attenuation. Our findings suggest that AGNs likely follow an inside-out quenching and the merger impact on the star formation in AGNs is less prominent than in SFGs.

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arXiv2021

Compact Groups of Galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey and LAMOST Spectral Survey. II. Dynamical Properties of Isolated and Embedded Groups

Compact groups (CGs) of galaxies appear to be the densest galaxy systems containing a few luminous galaxies in close proximity to each other, which have a typical size of a few tens kilopacsec in observation. On the other hand, in the modern hierarchical structure formation paradigm, galaxies are assembled and grouped in dark matter haloes, which have a typical size of a few hundreds of kiloparsec. Few studies have explored the physical connection between the observation based CGs and halo model based galaxy groups to date. In this study, by matching the largest local CG catalog of Zheng & Shen (2020) to the halo based group catalog of Yang et al. (2007), we find that the CGs are physically heterogenous systems and can be mainly separated into two categories, the isolated systems and those embedded in rich groups or clusters. By examining the dynamical features of CGs, we find that the isolated CGs have systematically lower dynamical masses than that of non-compact ones at the same group luminosity, indicating a more evolved stage of isolated CGs. On the other hand, the embedded CGs are mixtures of chance alignments in poor clusters and recent infalling groups (sub-structures) of rich clusters.

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arXiv2021

Asymmetry Revisited: The Effect of Dust Attenuation and Galaxy Inclination

Dust attenuation of an inclined galaxy can cause additional asymmetries in observations, even if the galaxy has a perfectly symmetric structure. {Taking advantage of the integral field spectroscopic data observed by the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey, we investigate the asymmetries of the emission-line and continuum maps of star-forming disk galaxies.} We define new parameters, $A_a$ and $A_b$, to estimate the asymmetries of a galaxy about its major and minor axes, respectively. Comparing $A_a$ and $A_b$ in different inclination bins, we attempt to detect the asymmetries caused by dust. For the continuum images, we find that $A_a$ increases with the inclination, while the $A_b$ is a constant as inclination changes. Similar trends are found for $g-r$, $g-i$ and $r-i$ color images. The dependence of the asymmetry on inclination suggests a thin dust layer with a scale height smaller than the stellar populations. For the H$α$ and H$β$ images, neither $A_a$ nor $A_b$ shows a significant correlation with inclination. Also, we do not find any significant dependence of the asymmetry of $E(B-V)_g$ on inclination, implying that the dust in the thick disk component is not significant. Compared to the SKIRT simulation, the results suggest that the thin dust disk has an optical depth $τ_V\sim0.2$. This is the first time that the asymmetries caused by the dust attenuation and the inclination are probed statistically with a large sample. Our results indicate that the combination of the dust attenuation and the inclination effects is a potential indicator of the 3D disk orientation.

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arXiv2021

Compact Groups of Galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey and LAMOST Spectral Survey: I. The Catalogs

A compact group (CG) is a kind of special galaxy system where the galaxy members are separated at the distances of the order of galaxy size. The strong interaction between the galaxy members makes CGs ideal labs for studying the environmental effects on galaxy evolution. The traditional photometric selection algorithm biases against the CG candidates at low redshifts, while the spectroscopic identification technique is affected by the spectroscopic incompleteness of sample galaxies and typically biases against the high redshift candidates. In this study, we combine these two methods and select CGs in the main galaxy sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, where we also have taken the advantages of the complementary redshift measurements from the LAMOST spectral and GAMA surveys. We have obtained the largest and most complete CG samples to date. Our samples include 6,144 CGs and 8,022 CG candidates, which are unique in the studies of the nature of the CGs and the evolution of the galaxies inside.

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arXiv2019

Properties of LBGs with [OIII] detection at z $\sim$ 3.5: The importance of including nebular emission data in SED fitting

Nebular emission lines are critical to measure physical properties in the ionized gas (e.g., metallicity, the SFR, or dust attenuation). They also account for a significant fraction of broadband fluxes, in particular at the highest redshifts, and therefore can strongly affect the determination of other physical properties, such as the stellar mass, which are crucial in shaping our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. We investigate a sample of 51 LBGs at 3.0<z<3.8 with detected [OIII] line emissions and estimated the physical properties of these galaxies to examine the impact of including nebular emission data in the SED fitting. We used CIGALE to fit the rest-frame UV-to-NIR SEDs of these galaxies and their emission line data simultaneously. We ran CIGALE with and without the nebular model or the emission line data, and compare the results to show the importance of including the nebular emission line data in the SED fitting. We find that without the nebular model, the fitting overestimates the stellar mass due to the strong [OIII] lines that are redshifted to the Ks-band, consistent with previous results. The emission line data are necessary to constrain the nebular model in the SED fitting. Examining the Ks-band excess, which is mostly used to estimate the emissions of the [OIII]+Hb lines when there is no spectral data, we find that the estimation and observation are statistically consistent. However, the difference can reach up to more than 1 dex in some catastrophic cases, which shows the importance of obtaining spectroscopic measurements for these lines. We also estimate the equivalent width of the Hb absorption and find it negligible compared to the Hb emission. We conclude that line emission is important to constrain the nebular models and to obtain reliable estimates of the physical properties of galaxies. These data should be taken into account in the SED fitting.

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arXiv2019

The galaxy luminosity function in the LAMOST Complete Spectroscopic Survey of Pointing Area at the Southern Galactic Cap

We present optical luminosity functions (LFs) of galaxies in the $^{0.1}g$, $^{0.1}r$, and $^{0.1}i$ bands, calculated using data in $\sim 40$ $deg^{2}$ sky area of LAMOST Complete Spectroscopic Survey of Pointing Area (LaCoSSPAr) in Southern Galactic Cap. Redshifts for galaxies brighter $r = 18.1$ were obtained mainly with LAMOST. In each band, LFs derived using both parametric and non-parametric maximum likelihood methods agree well with each other. In the $^{0.1}r$ band, our fitting parameters of the Schechter function are $ϕ_{*}=(1.65\pm0.36)\times10^{-2}h^{3}Mpc^{-3}$, $M_{*}=-20.69\pm0.06$ mag, and $α=-1.12\pm0.08$, in agreements with previous studies. Separate LFs are also derived for emission line galaxies and absorption line galaxies, respectively. The LFs of absorption line galaxies show a dip at $^{0.1}r \sim 18.5$ and can be well fitted by a double-Gaussian function, suggesting a bi-modality in passive galaxies.

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arXiv2019

Exploring the Star Formation Histories of Galaxies in Different Environments from MaNGA Spectra

The star formation history (SFH) of galaxies allow us to investigate when galaxies formed their stars and assembled their mass. We can constrain the SFH with high level of precision from galaxies with resolved stellar populations, since we are able to discriminate between stars of different ages from the spectrum they emit. However, the relative importance of secular evolution (nature) over nurture is not yet clear, and separating the effects of interaction-driven evolution in the observed galaxy properties is not trivial. The aim of this study is to use MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) Integral Field Unit (IFU) data, in combination with multi-wavelength data, to constrain the SFH of nearby isolated galaxies. We present here the new techniques we are developing to constrain the SFH with high level of precision from Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) fitting. This study is part of a China-Chile collaboration program where we are applying these new techniques to investigate how galaxies formed and evolve in different environments.

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arXiv2018

Stellar population synthesis of galaxies with chemical evolution model

The derivation of accurate stellar populations of galaxies is a non-trivial task because of the well-known age-metallicity degeneracy. We aim to break this degeneracy by invoking a chemical evolution model(CEM) for isolated disk galaxy, where its metallicity enrichment history(MEH) is modelled to be tightly linked to its star formation history(SFH). Our CEM has been successfully tested on several local group dwarf galaxies whose SFHs and MEHs have been both independently measured from deep color-magnitude diagrams of individual stars. By introducing the CEM into the stellar population fitting algorithm as a prior, we expect that the SFH of galaxies could be better constrained.

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arXiv2018

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) Quasar Survey: the 4th and 5th Data Release

We present the Data Release 4&5 quasar catalog from the quasar survey by Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), which includes quasars observed between September 2015 and June 2017. There are a total of 19,253 quasars identified by visual inspections of the spectra. Among them, 11,458 are independently discovered by LAMOST, in which 3296 were reported by SDSS DR12 and DR14 quasar catalog after our survey began, while the rest 8162 are new discoveries of LAMOST. We provide the emission line measurements for the Halpha, Hbeta, MgII and/or CIV for 18100 quasars. Since LAMOST does not have absolute flux calibration information, we obtain the monochromatic continuum luminosities by fitting the SDSS photometric data using the quasar spectra, and then estimate the black hole masses. The catalog and spectra for these quasars are available online. This is the third installment in the series of LAMOST quasar survey which has released spectra for totally ~43,000 quasars hitherto. There are 24,772 independently discovered quasars, 17,128 of which are newly discovered. In addition to the great supplement to the new quasar discoveries, LAMOST has also provided a large database (overlapped with SDSS) for investigating the quasar spectral variability and discovering unusual quasars, including changing-look quasars, with ongoing and upcoming large surveys.

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arXiv2018

The Fundamental Plane of Open Clusters

We utilize the data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment-2 (APOGEE-2) in the fourteenth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to calculate the line-of-sight velocity dispersion $σ_{1D}$ of a sample of old open clusters (age larger than 100\,Myr) selected from the Milky Way open cluster catalog of Kharchenko et al. (2013). Together with their $K_s$ band luminosity $L_{K_s}$, and the half-light radius $r_{h}$ of the most probable members, we find that these three parameters show significant pairwise correlations among each other. Moreover, a fundamental plane-{\it like} relation among these parameters is found for the oldest open clusters (age older than 1\,Gyr), $L_{K_s}\proptoσ_{1D}^{0.82\pm0.29}\cdot r_h^{2.19\pm0.52}$ with $rms \sim\, 0.31$\,mag in the $K_s$ band absolute magnitude. The existence of this relation, which deviates significantly from the virial theorem prediction, implies that the dynamical structures of the old open clusters are quite similar, when survived from complex dynamical evolution to age older than 1 Gyr.

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arXiv2018

Three-dimensional structure of the milky way dust: modeling of LAMOST data

We present a three-dimensional modeling of the Milky Way dust distribution by fitting the value-added star catalog of LAMOST spectral survey. The global dust distribution can be described by an exponential disk with scale-length of 3,192 pc and scale height of 103 pc. In this modeling, the Sun is located above the dust disk with a vertical distance of 23 pc. Besides the global smooth structure, two substructures around the solar position are also identified. The one located at $150^{\circ}<l<200^{\circ}$ and $-5^{\circ}<b<-30^{\circ}$ is consistent with the Gould Belt model of \citet{Gontcharov2009}, and the other one located at $140^{\circ}<l<165^{\circ}$ and $0^{\circ}<b<15^{\circ}$ is associated with the Camelopardalis molecular clouds.

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