Engineering topics

Lupton, Robert H

Publications and source records attributed to Lupton, Robert H.

4 records

DOE OSTI2012

A DESCRIPTION OF QUASAR VARIABILITY MEASURED USING REPEATED SDSS AND POSS IMAGING

We provide a quantitative description and statistical interpretation of the optical continuum variability of quasars. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has obtained repeated imaging in five UV-to-IR photometric bands for 33,881 spectroscopically confirmed quasars. About 10,000 quasars have an average of 60 observations in each band obtained over a decade along Stripe 82 (S82), whereas the remaining {approx}25,000 have 2-3 observations due to scan overlaps. The observed time lags span the range from a day to almost 10 years, and constrain quasar variability at rest-frame time lags of up to 4 years, and at rest-frame wavelengths from 1000 A to 6000 A. We publicly release a user-friendly catalog of quasars from the SDSS Data Release 7 that have been observed at least twice in SDSS or once in both SDSS and the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, and we use it to analyze the ensemble properties of quasar variability. Based on a damped random walk (DRW) model defined by a characteristic timescale and an asymptotic variability amplitude that scale with the luminosity, black hole mass, and rest wavelength for individual quasars calibrated in S82, we can fully explain the ensemble variability statistics of the non-S82 quasars such as the exponential distribution of large magnitude changes. All available data are consistent with the DRW model as a viable description of the optical continuum variability of quasars on timescales of {approx}5-2000 days in the rest frame. We use these models to predict the incidence of quasar contamination in transient surveys such as those from the Palomar Transient Factory and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2012

Ensemble Properties of Comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present the ensemble properties of 31 comets (27 resolved and 4 unresolved) observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This sample of comets represents about 1 comet per 10 million SDSS photometric objects. Five-band (u, g, r, i, z) photometry is used to determine the comets colors, sizes, surface brightness profiles, and rates of dust production in terms of the Afp formalism. We find that the cumulative luminosity function for the Jupiter Family Comets in our sample is well fit by a power law of the form N(<H) {proportional_to} 10{sup (0.49{+-}0.05)H} for H < 18, with evidence of a much shallower fit N(<H) {proportional_to} 10{sup (0.19{+-}0.03)H} for the faint (14.5 < H < 18) comets. The resolved comets show an extremely narrow distribution of colors (0.57 {+-} 0.05 in g - r for example), which are statistically indistinguishable from that of the Jupiter Trojans. Further, there is no evidence of correlation between color and physical, dynamical, or observational parameters for the observed comets.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2011

GALAXY CLUSTERING IN THE COMPLETED SDSS REDSHIFT SURVEY: THE DEPENDENCE ON COLOR AND LUMINOSITY

We measure the luminosity and color dependence of galaxy clustering in the largest-ever galaxy redshift survey, the main galaxy sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Seventh Data Release. We focus on the projected correlation function w{sub p} (r{sub p}) of volume-limited samples, extracted from the parent sample of {approx}700,000 galaxies over 8000 deg{sup 2}, extending up to redshift of 0.25. We interpret our measurements using halo occupation distribution (HOD) modeling assuming a {Lambda}CDM cosmology (inflationary cold dark matter with a cosmological constant). The amplitude of w{sub p} (r{sub p}) grows slowly with luminosity for L < L{sub *} and increases sharply at higher luminosities, with a large-scale bias factor b(> L) x ({sigma}{sub 8}/0.8) = 1.06 + 0.21(L/L{sub *}){sup 1.12}, where L is the sample luminosity threshold. At fixed luminosity, redder galaxies exhibit a higher amplitude and steeper correlation function, a steady trend that runs through the 'blue cloud' and 'green valley' and continues across the 'red sequence'. The cross-correlation of red and blue galaxies is close to the geometric mean of their autocorrelations, dropping slightly below at r{sub p} < 1 h{sup -1} Mpc. The luminosity trends for the red and blue galaxy populations separately are strikingly different. Blue galaxies show a slow but steady increase of clustering strength with luminosity, with nearly constant shape of w{sub p} (r{sub p}). The large-scale clustering of red galaxies shows little luminosity dependence until a sharp increase at L > 4 L{sub *}, but the lowest luminosity red galaxies (0.04-0.25 L{sub *}) show very strong clustering on small scales (r{sub p} < 2 h{sup -1} Mpc). Most of the observed trends can be naturally understood within the {Lambda}CDM+HOD framework. The growth of w{sub p} (r{sub p}) for higher luminosity galaxies reflects an overall shift in the mass scale of their host dark matter halos, in particular an increase in the minimum host halo mass M{sub min}. The mass at which a halo has, on average, one satellite galaxy brighter than L is M{sub 1} {approx} 17 M{sub min}(L) over most of the luminosity range, with a smaller ratio above L{sub *}. The growth and steepening of w{sub p} (r{sub p}) for redder galaxies reflects the increasing fraction of galaxies that are satellite systems in high-mass halos instead of central systems in low-mass halos, a trend that is especially marked at low luminosities. Our extensive measurements, provided in tabular form, will allow detailed tests of theoretical models of galaxy formation, a firm grounding of semiempirical models of the galaxy population, and new constraints on cosmological parameters from combining real-space galaxy clustering with mass-sensitive statistics such as redshift-space distortions, cluster mass-to-light ratios, and galaxy-galaxy lensing.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2010

Detecting active comets with SDSS

Using a sample of serendipitously discovered active comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we develop well-controlled selection criteria for greatly increasing the efficiency of comet identification in the SDSS catalogs. After follow-up visual inspection of images to reject remaining false positives, the total sample of SDSS comets presented here contains 19 objects, roughly one comet per 10 million other SDSS objects. The good understanding of selection effects allows a study of the population statistics, and we estimate the apparent magnitude distribution to r {approx} 18, the ecliptic latitude distribution, and the comet distribution in SDSS color space. The most surprising results are the extremely narrow range of colors for comets in our sample (e.g. root-mean-square scatter of only {approx}0.06 mag for the g-r color), and the similarity of comet colors to those of jovian Trojans. We discuss the relevance of our results for upcoming deep multi-epoch optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and estimate that LSST may produce a sample of about 10,000 comets over its 10-year lifetime.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗