Is there a saturation limit on the DES galaxies table? For r greater than 17.7 I do not get any values. Thanks!

Question

Hi There,

I am doing a student research and I am querying the DES DR1 Galaxy table and don´t get galaxies with r greater than 17.7. Is this due to some saturation limit? Or is there something wrong in my query?
Cheers,
Kat

Answer 1

Hi Kat, thanks for reaching out.

What is your exact query? I just tried

select mag_auto_r from des_dr1.galaxies where mag_auto_r<99 and snr_r>10

and get 7890443 rows, whose histogram looks like this:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=145yi2H92BAI_hyoPCTXHtOJZ37mrZUwq

I've marked 17.7 with a vertical line. So, there are some galaxies brighter than that, but not many. See also Fig. 10 in the DES DR1 paper: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJS..239...18A/abstract

Hope this helps. Let us know if we can help more.

Robert