CEA News
Latest and archived news from the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University.
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Testing strong lensing subhalo detection with a cosmological simulation
Quihan He, January 2023
Strong gravitational lensing offers a compelling test of the cold dark matter paradigm, as it allows for subhaloes with masses of ~10^9 M⊙ and below to be detected. A recent paper led by astronomers at the CEA tests commonly used techniques for detecting subhaloes superposed in images of strongly lensed galaxies....
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Spectroscopic follow-up of a subset of the Gaia/IPHAS catalogue of Hα-excess sources
Matteo Fratta, January 2023
State-of-the-art techniques to identify Hα emission-line sources in narrow-band photometric surveys consist of searching for Hα excess with reference to nearby objects in the sky (position-based selection). However, while this approach usually yields very few spurious detections, it may fail to select intrinsically faint and/or rare Hα-excess sources....
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Gravitational lensing effects of supermassive black holes in cluster environments
Guillaume Mahler, January 2023
This study explores the gravitational lensing effects of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxy clusters. While the presence of central SMBHs in galaxies is firmly established, recent work from high-resolution simulations predict the existence of an additional population of wandering SMBHs....
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XGAPS: a sub-arcsec cross-match of galactic plane surveys
Simone Scaringi, January 2023
A recent paper led by astronomers at the CEA presents a sub-arcsec cross-match of Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) against the INT Galactic Plane Surveys (IGAPS) and the United Kingdom Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS).....
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The demographics of obscured AGN from X-ray spectroscopy guided by multiwavelength information
Brivael Laloux, January 2023
A complete census of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is a prerequisite for understanding the growth of supermassive black holes across cosmic time. A significant challenge toward this goal is the whereabouts of heavily obscured AGN that remain uncertain.....
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PyAutoGalaxy: Open-Source Multiwavelength Galaxy Structure & Morphology
James Nightingale, January 2023
Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble famously classified galaxies into three distinct groups: ellipticals, spirals and irregulars (Hubble, 1926). Today, by analysing millions of galaxies with advanced image processing techniques Astronomers have expanded on this picture and revealed the rich diversity of galaxy morphology....