arXiv subjects

Sphesihle Makhathini

Publications and source records attributed to Sphesihle Makhathini.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

RadioLensfit: Bayesian weak lensing measurement in the visibility domain

Observationally, weak lensing has been served so far by optical surveys due to the much larger number densities of background galaxies achieved, which is typically by two to three orders of magnitude compared to radio. However, the high sensitivity of the new generation of radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will provide a density of detected galaxies that is comparable to that found at optical wavelengths, and with significant source shape measurements to make large area radio surveys competitive for weak lensing studies. This will lead weak lensing to become one of the primary science drivers in radio surveys too, with the advantage that they will access the largest scales in the Universe going beyond optical surveys, like LSST and Euclid, in terms of redshifts that are probed. RadioLensfit is an adaptation to radio data of "lensfit", a model-fitting approach for galaxy shear measurement, originally developed for optical weak lensing surveys. Its key advantage is working directly in the visibility domain, which is the natural approach to adopt with radio data, avoiding systematics due to the imaging process. We present results on galaxy shear measurements, including investigation of sensitivity to instrumental parameters such as the visibilities gridding size, based on simulations of individual galaxy visibilities performed by using SKA1-MID baseline configuration. We get an amplitude of the shear bias in the method comparable with SKA1 requirements for a population of galaxies with realistic flux and scalelength distributions estimated from the VLA SWIRE catalog.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Weak Lensing Simulations for the SKA

Weak gravitational lensing measurements are traditionally made at optical wavelengths where many highly resolved galaxy images are readily available. However, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) holds great promise for this type of measurement at radio wavelengths owing to its greatly increased sensitivity and resolution over typical radio surveys. The key to successful weak lensing experiments is in measuring the shapes of detected sources to high accuracy. In this document we describe a simulation pipeline designed to simulate radio images of the quality required for weak lensing, and will be typical of SKA observations. We provide as input, images with realistic galaxy shapes which are then simulated to produce images as they would have been observed with a given radio interferometer. We exploit this pipeline to investigate various stages of a weak lensing experiment in order to better understand the effects that may impact shape measurement. We first show how the proposed SKA1-Mid array configurations perform when we compare the (known) input and output ellipticities. We then investigate how making small changes to these array configurations impact on this input-outut ellipticity comparison. We also demonstrate how alternative configurations for SKA1-Mid that are smaller in extent, and with a faster survey speeds produce similar performance to those originally proposed. We then show how a notional SKA configuration performs in the same shape measurement challenge. Finally, we describe ongoing efforts to utilise our simulation pipeline to address questions relating to how applicable current (mostly originating from optical data) shape measurement techniques are to future radio surveys. As an alternative to such image plane techniques, we lastly discuss a shape measurement technique based on the shapelets formalism that reconstructs the source shapes directly from the visibility data.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Non-thermal emission from galaxy clusters: feasibility study with SKA1

Galaxy clusters are known to host a variety of extended radio sources: tailed radio galaxies whose shape is modelled by the interaction with the intra-cluster medium (ICM); radio bubbles filling cavities in the ICM distribution and rising buoyantly through the thermal gas; diffuse giant radio sources ("halos" and "relics") revealing the presence of relativistic electrons and magnetic fields in the intra-cluster volume. It is currently the subject of an active debate how the non-thermal components that we observe at radio wavelengths affect the physical properties of the ICM and depend on the dynamical state of galaxy clusters. In this work we start our SKA1 feasibility study of the "radio cluster zoo" through simulations of a typical radio-loud cluster, hosting several bright tailed radio galaxies and a diffuse radio halo. Realistic simulations of SKA1 observations are obtained through the MeqTrees software. A new deconvolution algorithm, based on sparse representations and optimised for the detection of faint diffuse astronomical sources, is tested and compared to the classical CLEAN method.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Morphological classification of radio sources for galaxy evolution and cosmology with SKA-MID

Morphologically classifying radio sources in continuum images with the SKA has the potential to address some of the key questions in cosmology and galaxy evolution. In particular, we may use different classes of radio sources as independent tracers of the dark-matter density field, and thus overcome cosmic variance in measuring large-scale structure, while on the galaxy evolution side we could measure the mechanical feedback from FRII and FRI jets. This work makes use of a \texttt{MeqTrees}-based simulations framework to forecast the ability of the SKA to recover true source morphologies at high redshifts. A suite of high resolution images containing realistic continuum source distributions with different morphologies (FRI, FRII, starburst galaxies) is fed through an SKA Phase 1 simulator, then analysed to determine the sensitivity limits at which the morphologies can still be distinguished. We also explore how changing the antenna distribution affects these results.

astro-ph.IM↗