Past exam of the frontiers of Observational Astrophysics course of the University of Cambridge / 2014 / Paper 1 / 1

The detector is intended for arcsecond-scale astronomical seeing, rather than the telescope's diffraction limit. A circular aperture of this area has diameter $1.13\mathrm{m}$, giving a Rayleigh criterion angle about $0.11$ arcsec at the observing wavelength. One-arcsecond pixels conventionally sample an astronomical seeing profile of roughly two arcseconds across with two samples; a one-arcsecond profile would be undersampled. The pixel scale alone does not determine an exact astronomical seeing width.

Use the supplied surface brightness as radiative flux integrated over the photometric passband: its units contain no inverse hertz. Treat $h\nu$ as the representative photon energy, and assume unit throughput and quantum efficiency. A genuinely frequency-specific brightness would require a bandwidth. With angles measured consistently in arcseconds, an annulus has area $2\pi rdr$ square arcseconds, soThis is flux per collecting area; collected energy is $AtF$. There is no extra conversion to steradians when both brightness and angular area use square arcseconds.

For Poisson photon counting, a pixel with expected count $N$ has energy $e=Nh\nu$ and standard deviation ${\sigma }_e=h\nu \sqrt{N}$. Thus the local four-sigma rule gives $N=4\sqrt{N}$, or 16 photons at the boundary. With pixel area $\Delta \Omega =1{\mathrm{arcsec}}^2$,Consequently $r_m=(1-16/32.6991)/k=10.2138$ arcsec andIntegrating to the model's outer radius $R=1/k=20$ arcsec instead givesThe pixel cut retains 51.6% of this total. It is an imposed isophotal photometry rule, not a fundamental limit: averaging annuli or fitting a justified profile can recover signal below the per-pixel cut.

In practice, sky background photons add shot noise even after subtraction of the mean sky. read noise, dark current, imperfect flat-field correction, throughput calibration and atmospheric extinction also matter. At large radius the dominant uncertainty can be a tiny error in the sky level, scattered light or the wings of the point spread function, rather than source photon statistics. Mask foreground stars and background objects, compare blank-sky regions and dithered exposures, and check profile recovery by inserting artificial extended sources. astronomical seeing and finite pixels convolve the intrinsic profile; model that response when extrapolating the total.

The luminosity convergence of an outer surface-brightness profile follows directly: $I\propto r^{-p}$ contributes $dF\propto r^{1-p}dr$, hence $F(<R)\propto R^{2-p}$ at large radius for $p<2$. For either shallow index considered, ever larger annuli dominate: extending the law to infinity gives an unphysical divergent luminosity. Such a law must eventually steepen or truncate. Over a finite range, however, substantial light can lie below a surface-brightness selection threshold and be mistaken for sky. This biases galaxy luminosities, the luminosity function and the inferred diffuse light budget; distant diffuse galaxies become especially incomplete because bolometric cosmological surface-brightness dimming scales as $(1+z{)}^{-4}$. An assumed finite-aperture total is therefore a model-dependent quantity.