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Yong Shi

Publications and source records attributed to Yong Shi.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Host Galaxy Properties of Changing-look AGN Revealed in the MaNGA Survey

Changing-look Active Galactic Nuclei (CL-AGNs) are a subset of AGNs in which the broad Balmer emission lines appear or disappear within a few years. We use the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey to identify five CL-AGNs. The 2-D photometric and kinematic maps reveal common features as well as some unusual properties of CL-AGN hosts as compared to the AGN hosts in general. All MaNGA CL-AGNs reside in the star-forming main sequence, similar to MaNGA non-changing-look AGNs (NCL-AGNs). The $80\% \pm 16\%$ of our CL-AGNs do possess pseudo-bulge features, and follow the overall NCL-AGNs $M_{BH}-σ_{*}$ relationship. The kinematic measurements indicate that they have similar distributions in the plane of angular momentum versus galaxy ellipticity. MaNGA CL-AGNs however show a higher, but not statistically significant ($20\% \pm 16\%$) fraction of counter-rotating features compared to that ($1.84\% \pm 0.61\%$) in general star-formation population. In addition, MaNGA CL-AGNs favor more face-on (axis ratio $>$ 0.7) than that of Type I NCL-AGNs. These results suggest that host galaxies could play a role in the CL-AGN phenomenon.

astro-ph.GA↗

Towards an Understanding of the Massive Red Spiral Galaxy Formation

To understand the formation and quenching processes of local massive red spiral galaxies with $M_{\ast} > 10^{10.5}M_{\odot}$, we perform a statistical analysis of their spectroscopic and structural properties, and compare them with elliptical and blue spiral galaxies of similar mass. The sample was selected from the stellar mass catalog of galaxies in SDSS DR7, according to their locations on the u-r color-stellar mass diagram. We find that red spirals harbor compact cores with high stellar mass surface densities measured by $Σ_1$ and they are bulge-dominated. Particularly, the red spirals, especially their bulges follow the $Σ_1$-$M_{\ast}$ ridgeline for quenched galaxies. Furthermore, the red spirals show similarly large central D$_n(4000)$, high [Mg/Fe] and dark matter halo mass to ellipticals. These results suggest that the bulges of red spirals formed within a short timescale before redshift ~ 1-2 and were quenched via a fast mode, similar to ellipticals. Careful examinations of the optical morphologies reveal that ~70% of red spirals show strong bars, rings/shells and even merging features, which suggests that interactions or mergers might have played an important role in the formation of red spirals. In contrast, most of the massive blue spirals have completely different spectral and structural properties from red spirals. However, the blue spirals with high $Σ_1$ ($Σ_1 > 10^{9.5} M_\odot \, {\rm kpc}^{-2}$) show similar structural and morphological properties, as well as similar halo mass and HI mass to red spirals. We discuss rejuvenation from red to blue as a possible explanation for these high $Σ_1$ blue spirals.

astro-ph.GA↗

Weak CS Emission in an Extremely Metal-poor Galaxy DDO 70

In most galaxies like the Milky Way, stars form in clouds of molecular gas. Unlike the CO emission that traces the bulk of molecular gas, the rotational transitions of HCN and CS molecules mainly probe the dense phase of molecular gas, which has a tight and almost linear relation with the far-infrared luminosity and star formation rate. However, it is unclear if dense molecular gas exists at very low metallicity, and if exists, how it is related to star formation. In this work, we report ALMA observations of the CS $J$=5$\rightarrow$4 emission line of DDO~70, a nearby gas-rich dwarf galaxy with $\sim7\%$ solar metallicity. We did not detect CS emission from all regions with strong CO emission. After stacking all CS spectra from CO-bright clumps, we find no more than a marginal detection of CS $J$=5$\rightarrow$4 transition, at a signal-to-noise ratio of $\sim 3.3$. This 3-$σ$ upper limit deviates from the $L^\prime_{\rm CS}$-$L_{\rm IR}$ and $L^\prime_{\rm CS}$-SFR relationships found in local star forming galaxies and dense clumps in the Milky Way, implying weaker CS emission at given IR luminosity and SFR. We discuss the possible mechanisms that suppress CS emission at low metallicity.

astro-ph.GA↗

The MALATANG Survey: Dense Gas and Star Formation from High Transition HCN and HCO+ maps of NGC253

To study the high-transition dense-gas tracers and their relationships to the star formation of the inner $\sim$ 2 kpc circumnuclear region of NGC253, we present HCN $J=4-3$ and HCO$^+ J=4-3$ maps obtained with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). With the spatially resolved data, we compute the concentration indices $r_{90}/r_{50}$ for the different tracers. HCN and HCO$^+$ 4-3 emission features tend to be centrally concentrated, which is in contrast to the shallower distribution of CO 1-0 and the stellar component. The dense-gas fraction ($f_\text{dense}$, traced by the velocity-integrated-intensity ratios of HCN/CO and HCO$^+$/CO) and the ratio $R_\text{31}$ (CO 3-2/1-0) decline towards larger galactocentric distances, but increase with higher SFR surface density. The radial variation and the large scatter of $f_\text{dense}$ and $R_\text{31}$ imply distinct physical conditions in different regions of the galactic disc. The relationships of $f_\text{dense}$ versus $Σ_\text{stellar}$, and SFE$_\text{dense}$ versus $Σ_\text{stellar}$ are explored. SFE$_\text{dense}$ increases with higher $Σ_\text{stellar}$ in this galaxy, which is inconsistent with previous work that used HCN 1-0 data. This implies that existing stellar components might have different effects on the high-$J$ HCN and HCO$^+$ than their low-$J$ emission. We also find that SFE$_\text{dense}$ seems to be decreasing with higher $f_\text{dense}$, which is consistent with previous works, and it suggests that the ability of the dense gas to form stars diminishes when the average density of the gas increases. This is expected in a scenario where only the regions with high-density contrast collapse and form stars.

astro-ph.GA↗

Over-sized gas clumps in an extremely-metal-poor molecular cloud revealed by ALMA's pc-scale maps

Metals are thought to have profound effects on the internal structures of molecular clouds in which stars are born. The absence of metals is expected to prevent gas from efficient cooling and fragmentation in theory. However, this effect has not yet been observed at low metallicity environments, such as in the early Universe and local dwarf galaxies, because of the lack of high spatial resolution maps of gas. We carried out ALMA observations of the carbon monoxide (CO) J=2-1 emission line at 1.4-parsec resolutions of a molecular cloud in DDO 70 at 7% solar metallicity, the most metal-poor galaxy currently known with a CO detection. In total, five clumps have been identified and they are found to follow more or less the Larson's law. Since the CO emission exists in regions with visual extinction A_V around 1.0, we converted this A_V to the gas mass surface density using a gas-to-dust ratio of 4,594+-2,848 for DDO 70. We found that the CO clumps in DDO 70 exhibit significantly larger (on average four times) sizes than those at the same gas mass surface densities in massive star-formation regions of the Milky Way. The existence of such large clumps appears to be consistent with theoretical expectations that gas fragmentation in low metallicity clouds is suppressed. While our observation is only for one cloud in the galaxy, if it is representative, the above result implies suppressed gas fragmentation during the cloud collapse and star formation in the early Universe.

astro-ph.GA↗

Learning to Incorporate Structure Knowledge for Image Inpainting

This paper develops a multi-task learning framework that attempts to incorporate the image structure knowledge to assist image inpainting, which is not well explored in previous works. The primary idea is to train a shared generator to simultaneously complete the corrupted image and corresponding structures --- edge and gradient, thus implicitly encouraging the generator to exploit relevant structure knowledge while inpainting. In the meantime, we also introduce a structure embedding scheme to explicitly embed the learned structure features into the inpainting process, thus to provide possible preconditions for image completion. Specifically, a novel pyramid structure loss is proposed to supervise structure learning and embedding. Moreover, an attention mechanism is developed to further exploit the recurrent structures and patterns in the image to refine the generated structures and contents. Through multi-task learning, structure embedding besides with attention, our framework takes advantage of the structure knowledge and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets quantitatively and qualitatively.

cs.CV↗

Molecular Oxygen in the nearest QSO Mrk 231

We report the detection of an emission feature at the 12 sigma level with FWHM line width of about 450 km/s toward the nearest quasi-stellar object, QSO Mrk 231. Based on observations with the IRAM 30 m telescope and the NOEMA Interferometer, the 11-10 transition of molecular oxygen is the likely origin of line with rest frequency close to 118.75 GHz. The velocity of the O2 emission in Mrk 231 coincides with the red wing seen in CO emission, suggesting that it is associated with the outflowing molecular gas, located mainly at about ten kpc away from the central AGN. This first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen provides an ideal tool to study AGN-driven molecular outflows on dynamic time scales of tens of Myr. O2 may be a significant coolant for molecular gas in such regions affected by AGN-driven outflows. New astrochemical models are needed to explain the implied high molecular oxygen abundance in such regions several kpc away from the center of galaxies.

astro-ph.GA↗

The HASHTAG project I. A Survey of CO(3-2) Emission from the Star Forming Disc of M31

We present a CO(3-2) survey of selected regions in the M31 disc as part of the JCMT large programme, HARP and SCUBA-2 High-Resolution Terahertz Andromeda Galaxy Survey (HASHTAG). The 12 CO(3-2) fields in this survey cover a total area of 60 square arcminutes, spanning a deprojected radial range of 2 - 14 kpc across the M31 disc. Combining these observations with existing IRAM 30m CO(1-0) observations and JCMT CO(3-2) maps of the nuclear region of M31, as well as dust temperature and star formation rate surface density maps, we are able to explore the radial distribution of the CO(3-2)/CO(1-0) integrated intensity ratio (R31) and its relationship with dust temperature and star formation. We find that the value of R31 between 2 - 9 kpc galactocentric radius is 0.14, significantly lower than what is seen in the nuclear ring at ~1 kpc (R31 ~ 0.8), only to rise again to 0.27 for the fields centred on the 10 kpc star forming ring. We also found that R31 is positively correlated with dust temperature, with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient $ρ$ = 0.55. The correlation between star formation rate surface density and CO(3--2) intensity is much stronger than with CO(1-0), with $ρ$ = 0.54 compared to -0.05, suggesting that the CO(3-2) line traces warmer and denser star forming gas better. We also find that R31 correlates well with star formation rate surface density, with $ρ$ = 0.69.

astro-ph.GA↗

Learning from Label Proportions with Generative Adversarial Networks

In this paper, we leverage generative adversarial networks (GANs) to derive an effective algorithm LLP-GAN for learning from label proportions (LLP), where only the bag-level proportional information in labels is available. Endowed with end-to-end structure, LLP-GAN performs approximation in the light of an adversarial learning mechanism, without imposing restricted assumptions on distribution. Accordingly, we can directly induce the final instance-level classifier upon the discriminator. Under mild assumptions, we give the explicit generative representation and prove the global optimality for LLP-GAN. Additionally, compared with existing methods, our work empowers LLP solver with capable scalability inheriting from deep models. Several experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate vivid advantages of the proposed approach.

cs.LG↗

Mapping Observations of complex organic molecules around Sagittarius B2 with ARO 12m telescope

We performed high-sensitivity mapping observations of several complex organic molecules around Sagittarius B2 with ARO 12m telescope at 3-mm wavelength. Based on their spatial distribution, molecules can be classified as either "extended" that detected not only in Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M), or "compact" that only detected toward or near to Sgr B2(N) and Sgr B2(M). The "extended" molecules including glycolaldehyde (CH2OHCHO), methyl formate (CH3OCHO), formic acid (t-HCOOH), ethanol (C2H5OH) and methyl amine (CH3NH2), while the "compact" molecules including dimethyl ether (CH3OCH3), ethyl cyanide (C2H5CN), and amino acetonitrile (H2NCH2CN). These "compact" molecules are likely produced under strong UV radiation, while "extended" molecules are likely formed under low-temperature, via gas-phase or grain surface reactions. The spatial distribution of "warm" CH2OHCHO at 89 GHz differ from the spatial distribution of "cold" CH2OHCHO observed at 13 GHz. We found evidence for an overabundance of CH2OHCHO compared to that expected from the gas-phase model, which indicates that grain-surface reactions are necessary to explain the origin of CH2OHCHO in Sagittarius B2. Grain-surface reactions are also needed to explain the correlation between the abundances of "cold" CH2OHCHO and C2H5OH. These results demonstrate the importance of grain-surface chemistry in the production of complex organic molecules.

astro-ph.SR↗

Resolving the Interstellar Medium in Ultraluminous Infrared QSO Hosts with ALMA

We present ALMA observations of the CO(1-0) line and 3-mm continuum emission in eight ultraluminous infrared (IR) quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) at z = 0.06-0.19. All eight IR QSO hosts are clearly resolved in their CO molecular gas emission with a median source size of 3.2 kpc, and seven out of eight sources are detected in 3-mm continuum, which is found to be more centrally concentrated with respect to molecular gas with sizes of 0.4-1.0 kpc. Our observations reveal a diversity of CO morphology and kinematics for the IR QSO systems which can be roughly classified into three categories, rotating gas disk with ordered velocity gradient, compact CO peak with disturbed velocity, and multiple CO distinct sources undergoing a merger between luminous QSO and a companion galaxy separated by a few kpc. The molecular gas in three of IR QSO hosts are found to be rotation-dominated with the ratio of the maximum rotation velocity to the local velocity dispersion of $V_{\rm rot}/σ=4-6$. Basic estimates of the dynamical masses within the CO-emitting regions give masses between $7.4\times10^9$ and $6.9\times10^{10}$ $M_\odot$. We find an increasing trend between BH mass accretion rate and star formation rate (SFR) over three orders of magnitude in far-IR luminosity/SFR, in line with the correlation between QSO bolometric luminosity and SF activity, indicative of a likely direct connection between AGN and SF activity over galaxy evolution timescales.

astro-ph.GA↗

Discovery of an Edge-on Galaxy with X-shaped Bi-cone --- SDSS J171359.00+333625.5

Using the integral field unit (IFU) data from Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, we study the kinematics of gas and stellar components in an edge-on Seyfert 2 galaxy, SDSS J171359.00+333625.5, with X-shaped bi-conical outflows. The gas and stars therein are found to be counter-rotating, indicating that the collision between the inner and external gas might be an effective way to dissipate the angular momentum, which leads to remarkable gas accretion into the galaxy center. Large [OIII]$λ$5007 equivalent width and AGN-like line ratio in the large bi-conical region suggest that the gas is ionized by the central AGN. The gas velocity in the bi-cone region shows that ionized gas is receding relative to the galaxy center, which could be the joint effect of inflows, outflows and disk rotation. We are probably witnessing the case where a great amount of gas in the disk is being efficiently accreted into the central black hole, and the AGN-driven galactic winds are blown out along the bi-cone. The kinematics of oxygen, including rotation velocity and velocity dispersion, is different from other elements, like hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur. The rotation velocity estimated from oxygen is slower than from other elements. The velocity dispersion of other elements follows galactic gravitational potential, while the velocity dispersion of oxygen stays roughly constant along the galactic major-axis. The further advanced observations, e.g. of cold gas or with an IFU of higher spatial resolution, are required to better understand this object.

astro-ph.GA↗

The ALMaQUEST Survey: The molecular gas main sequence and the origin of the star forming main sequence

The origin of the star forming main sequence ( i.e., the relation between star formation rate and stellar mass, globally or on kpc-scales; hereafter SFMS) remains a hotly debated topic in galaxy evolution. Using the ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) survey, we show that for star forming spaxels in the main sequence galaxies, the three local quantities, star-formation rate surface density (\sigsfr), stellar mass surface density (\sigsm), and the \h2~mass surface density (\sigh2), are strongly correlated with one another and form a 3D linear (in log) relation with dispersion. In addition to the two well known scaling relations, the resolved SFMS (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigsm) and the Schmidt-Kennicutt relation (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigh2; SK relation), there is a third scaling relation between \sigh2~ and \sigsm, which we refer to as the `molecular gas main sequence' (MGMS). The latter indicates that either the local gas mass traces the gravitational potential set by the local stellar mass or both quantities follow the underlying total mass distributions. The scatter of the resolved SFMS ($σ\sim 0.25$ dex) is the largest compared to those of the SK and MGMS relations ($σ\sim$ 0.2 dex). A Pearson correlation test also indicates that the SK and MGMS relations are more strongly correlated than the resolved SFMS. Our result suggests a scenario in which the resolved SFMS is the least physically fundamental and is the consequence of the combination of the SK and the MGMS relations.

astro-ph.GA↗

s-LWSR: Super Lightweight Super-Resolution Network

Deep learning (DL) architectures for superresolution (SR) normally contain tremendous parameters, which has been regarded as the crucial advantage for obtaining satisfying performance. However, with the widespread use of mobile phones for taking and retouching photos, this character greatly hampers the deployment of DL-SR models on the mobile devices. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a super lightweight SR network: s-LWSR. There are mainly three contributions in our work. Firstly, in order to efficiently abstract features from the low resolution image, we build an information pool to mix multi-level information from the first half part of the pipeline. Accordingly, the information pool feeds the second half part with the combination of hierarchical features from the previous layers. Secondly, we employ a compression module to further decrease the size of parameters. Intensive analysis confirms its capacity of trade-off between model complexity and accuracy. Thirdly, by revealing the specific role of activation in deep models, we remove several activation layers in our SR model to retain more information for performance improvement. Extensive experiments show that our s-LWSR, with limited parameters and operations, can achieve similar performance to other cumbersome DL-SR methods.

eess.IV↗

The spatial extension of extended narrow line regions in MaNGA AGN

In this work, we revisit the size-luminosity relation of the extended narrow line regions (ENLRs) using a large sample of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey. The ENLRs ionized by the AGN are identified through the spatially resolved BPT diagram, which results in a sample of 152 AGN. By combining our AGN with the literature high-luminosity quasars, we found a tight log-linear relation between the size of the ENLR and the AGN [O III]λ5007Å luminosity over four orders of magnitude of the [O III] luminosity. The slope of this relation is 0.42 $\pm$ 0.02 which can be explained in terms of a distribution of clouds photoionized by the AGN. This relation also indicates the AGN have the potential to ionize and heat the gas clouds at a large distance from the nuclei without the aids of outflows and jets for the low-luminosity Seyferts.

astro-ph.GA↗

Spatially Resolved Studies of Local Massive Red Spiral Galaxies

We report two-dimensional spectroscopic analysis of massive red spiral galaxies ($M_{*}$ $>$ 10$^{10.5}$ $M_{\odot}$) and compare them to blue spiral and red elliptical galaxies above the same mass limit based on the public SDSS DR15 MaNGA observations. We find that the stellar population properties of red spiral galaxies are more similar to those of elliptical galaxies than to blue spiral galaxies. Red spiral galaxies show a shallow mass-weighted age profile, and they have higher stellar metallicity and Mgb/${\rm \langle Fe \rangle}$ across the whole 1.5$R_{\rm e}$ as compared to blue spirals, but all these properties are close to those of elliptical galaxies. One scenario to explain this is that red spirals form as remnants of very gas-rich major mergers that happened above $z$$\sim$1.

astro-ph.GA↗

Post-Starburst Galaxies in SDSS-IV MaNGA

Post-starburst galaxies, identified by their unusually strong Balmer absorption lines and weaker than average emission lines, have traditionally been selected based on their central stellar populations. Here we identify 360 galaxies with post-starburst regions from the MaNGA integral field survey and classify these galaxies into three types: 31 galaxies with central post-starburst regions (CPSB), 37 galaxies with off-center ring-like post-starburst regions (RPSB) and 292 galaxies with irregular post-starburst regions (IPSB). Focussing on the CPSB and RPSB samples, and comparing their radial gradients in D$_n$4000, H$δ_{\rm A}$ and W(H$α$) to control samples, we find that while the CPSBs have suppressed star formation throughout their bulge and disk, and clear evidence of rapid decline of star formation in the central regions, the RPSBs only show clear evidence of recently rapidly suppressed star formation in their outer regions and an ongoing central starburst. The radial profiles in mass-weighted age and stellar $v/σ$ indicate that CPSBs and RPSBs are not simply different evolutionary stages of the same event, rather that CPSB galaxies are caused by a significant disruptive event, while RPSB galaxies are caused by disruption of gas fuelling to the outer regions. Compared to the control samples, both CPSB and RPSB galaxies show a higher fraction of interactions/mergers, misaligned gas or bars that might be the cause of the gas inflows and subsequent quenching.

astro-ph.GA↗

SDSS IV MaNGA -- Star-Formation Driven Biconical Outflows in the Local Univers

We present a sample of 48 nearby galaxies with central, biconical outflows identified by the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey. All considered galaxies have star formation driven bi-conical central outflows (SFB), with no signs of AGN. We find that the SFB outflows require high central concentration of the star formation rate. This increases the gas velocity dispersion over the equilibrium limit and helps maintain the gas outflows. The central starbursts increase the metallicity, extinction, and the alpha/Fe ratio in the gas. Significant amount of young stellar population at the centers suggests that the SFBs are associated with the formation of young bulges in galaxies. More than 70% of SFB galaxies are group members or have companions with no prominent interaction, or show asymmetry of external isophotes. In 15% SFB cases stars and gas rotate in the opposite directions, which points at the gas infall from satellites as the primary reason for triggering the SFB phenomena.

astro-ph.GA↗