No Arabic abstract
We have conducted a search for new strong gravitational lensing systems in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Legacy Imaging Surveys Data Release 8. We use deep residual neural networks, building on previous work presented in Huang et al. (2020). These surveys together cover approximately one third of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere, reaching a z band AB magnitude of ~22.5. We compile a training sample that consists of known lensing systems as well as non-lenses in the Legacy Surveys and the Dark Energy Survey. After applying our trained neural networks to the survey data, we visually inspect and rank images with probabilities above a threshold. Here we present 1210 new strong lens candidates.
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are a combination of three public projects (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey) that will jointly image approximately 14,000 deg^2 of the extragalactic sky visible from the northern hemisphere in three optical bands (g, r, and z) using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The combined survey footprint is split into two contiguous areas by the Galactic plane. The optical imaging is conducted using a unique strategy of dynamically adjusting the exposure times and pointing selection during observing that results in a survey of nearly uniform depth. In addition to calibrated images, the project is delivering a catalog, constructed by using a probabilistic inference-based approach to estimate source shapes and brightnesses. The catalog includes photometry from the grz optical bands and from four mid-infrared bands (at 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 micorons) observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite during its full operational lifetime. The project plans two public data releases each year. All the software used to generate the catalogs is also released with the data. This paper provides an overview of the Legacy Surveys project.
We perform a semi-automated search for strong gravitational lensing systems in the 9,000 deg$^2$ Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), part of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (Dey et al.). The combination of the depth and breadth of these surveys are unparalleled at this time, making them particularly suitable for discovering new strong gravitational lensing systems. We adopt the deep residual neural network architecture (He et al.) developed by Lanusse et al. for the purpose of finding strong lenses in photometric surveys. We compile a training set that consists of known lensing systems in the Legacy Surveys and DES as well as non-lenses in the footprint of DECaLS. In this paper we show the results of applying our trained neural network to the cutout images centered on galaxies typed as ellipticals (Lang et al.) in DECaLS. The images that receive the highest scores (probabilities) are visually inspected and ranked. Here we present 335 candidate strong lensing systems, identified for the first time.
We characterise the selection cuts and clustering properties of a magnitude-limited sample of bright galaxies that is part of the Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) using the ninth data release of the Legacy Imaging Surveys (DR9). We describe changes in the DR9 selection compared to the DR8 one as explored in Ruiz-Macias et al. (2021). We also compare the DR9 selection in three distinct regions: BASS/MzLS in the north Galactic Cap (NGC), DECaLS in the NGC, and DECaLS in the south Galactic Cap (SGC). We investigate the systematics associated with the selection and assess its completeness by matching the BGS targets with the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. We measure the angular clustering for the overall bright sample (r $leq$ 19.5) and as function of apparent magnitude and colour. This enables to determine the clustering strength and slope by fitting a power-law model that can be used to generate accurate mock catalogues for this tracer. We use a counts-in-cells technique to explore higher-order statistics and cross-correlations with external spectroscopic data sets in order to check the evolution of the clustering with redshift and the redshift distribution of the BGS targets using clustering-redshifts. While this work validates the properties of the BGS bright targets, the final target selection pipeline and clustering properties of the entire DESI BGS will be fully characterised and validated with the spectroscopic data of Survey Validation.
The quasar target selection for the upcoming survey of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will be fixed for the next five years. The aim of this work is to validate the quasar selection by studying the impact of imaging systematics as well as stellar and galactic contaminants, and to develop a procedure to mitigate them. Density fluctuations of quasar targets are found to be related to photometric properties such as seeing and depth of the Data Release 9 of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. To model this complex relation, we explore machine learning algorithms (Random Forest and Multi-Layer Perceptron) as an alternative to the standard linear regression. Splitting the footprint of the Legacy Imaging Surveys into three regions according to photometric properties, we perform an independent analysis in each region, validating our method using eBOSS EZ-mocks. The mitigation procedure is tested by comparing the angular correlation of the corrected target selection on each photometric region to the angular correlation function obtained using quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)Data Release 16. With our procedure, we recover a similar level of correlation between DESI quasar targets and SDSS quasars in two thirds of the total footprint and we show that the excess of correlation in the remaining area is due to a stellar contamination which should be removed with DESI spectroscopic data. We derive the Limber parameters in our three imaging regions and compare them to previous measurements from SDSS and the 2dF QSO Redshift Survey.
We extend the halo-based group finder developed by Yang et al. (2005b) to use data {it simultaneously} with either photometric or spectroscopic redshifts. A mock galaxy redshift surveys constructed from a high-resolution N-body simulation is used to evaluate the performance of this extended group finder. For galaxies with magnitude ${rm zle 21}$ and redshift $0<zle 1.0$ in the DESI legacy imaging surveys (The Legacy Surveys), our group finder successfully identifies more than 60% of the members in about $90%$ of halos with mass $ga 10^{12.5}msunh$. Detected groups with mass $ga 10^{12.0}msunh$ have a purity (the fraction of true groups) greater than 90%. The halo mass assigned to each group has an uncertainty of about 0.2 dex at the high mass end $ga 10^{13.5}msunh$ and 0.45 dex at the low mass end. Groups with more than 10 members have a redshift accuracy of $sim 0.008$. We apply this group finder to the Legacy Surveys DR8 and find 6.4 Million groups with at least 3 members. About 500,000 of these groups have at least 10 members. The resulting catalog containing 3D coordinates, richness, halo masses, and total group luminosities, is made publicly available.