The missing historical record of the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova (SN) event implies a large extinction to the SN, possibly greater than the interstellar extinction to the current SN remnant. Here we investigate the possibility that the guest star that appeared near Cas A in 1592{1593 in Korean history books could have been an `impostor' of the Cas A SN, i.e., a luminous transient that appeared to be a SN but did not destroy the progenitor star, with strong mass loss to have provided extra circumstellar extinction. We rst review the Korean records and show that a spatial coincidence between the guest star and Cas A cannot be ruled out, as opposed to previous studies. Based on modern astrophysical ndings on core-collapse SN, we argue that Cas A could have had an impostor and derive its anticipated properties. It turned out that the Cas A SN impostor must have been bright (MV = - 14:72:2 mag) and an amount of dust with visual extinction of ≥ 2:8  2:2 mag should have formed in the ejected envelope and/or in a strong wind afterwards. The mass loss needs to have been spherically asymmetric in order to see the light echo from the SN event but not the one from the impostor event.

A data simulator and reduction package for the Devasthal Optical Telescope Integral Field Spectro- graph (DOTIFS) has been developed. Since data reduction for the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) requires complicated procedures due to the complex nature of the integral spectrograph, common reduc- tion procedures are usually not directly applicable for such an instrument. Therefore, the development of an optimized package for the DOTIFS is required. The data simulator observes artificial object and simulates CCD images for the instrument considering various effects; e.g. atmosphere, sky background, transmission, spectrograph optics aberration, and detector noise. The data reduction package has been developed based on the outcomes from the DOTIFS data simulator. The reduction package includes the entire processes for the reduction; pre-processing, at-fielding, and sky subtraction. It generates 3D data cubes as a final product, which users can use for science directly.

The Horizon Run 4 is a cosmological N-body simulation designed for the study of coupled evolution between galaxies and large-scale structures of the Universe, and for the test of galaxy formation models. Using 63003 gravitating particles in a cubic box of Lbox = 3150 h−1Mpc, we build a dense forest of halo merger trees to trace the halo merger history with a halo mass resolution scale down to Ms = 2.7 × 1011h−1M⊙. We build a set of particle and halo data, which can serve as testbeds for comparison of cosmological models and gravitational theories with observations. We find that the FoF halo mass function shows a substantial deviation from the universal form with tangible redshift evolution of amplitude and shape. At higher redshifts, the amplitude of the mass function is lower, and the functional form is shifted toward larger values of ln(1/σ). We also find that the baryonic acoustic oscillation feature in the two-point correlation function of mock galaxies becomes broader with a peak position moving to smaller scales and the peak amplitude decreasing for increasing directional cosine μ compared to the linear predictions. From the halo merger trees built from halo data at 75 redshifts, we measure the half-mass epoch of halos and find that less massive halos tend to reach half of their current mass at higher redshifts. Simulation outputs including snapshot data, past lightcone space data, and halo merger data are available at http://sdss.kias.re.kr/astro/Horizon-Run4.

We use a volume-limited sample of quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR7 quasar catalog to identify quasar groups and address their statistical significance. This quasar sample has a uniform selection function on the sky and nearly a maximum possible contiguous volume that can be drawn from the DR7 catalog. Quasar groups are identified by using the Friend-of-Friend algorithm with a set of fixed comoving linking lengths. We find that the richness distribution of the richest 100 quasar groups or the size distribution of the largest 100 groups are statistically equivalent with those of randomly-distributed points with the same number density and sky coverage when groups are identified with the linking length of 70 h−1Mpc. It is shown that the large-scale structures like the huge Large Quasar Group (U1.27) reported by Clowes et al. (2013) can be found with high probability even if quasars have no physical clustering, and does not challenge the initially homogeneous cosmological models. Our results are statistically more reliable than those of Nadathur (2013), where the test was made only for the largest quasar group. It is shown that the linking length should be smaller than 50 h−1Mpc in order for the quasar groups identified in the DR7 catalog not to be dominated by associations of quasars grouped by chance. We present 20 richest quasar groups identified with the linking length of 70 h−1Mpc for further analyses.