Study of stellar populations in the bulges of barred galaxies

We have obtained long-slit spectroscopy for a sample of 20 early-type barred galaxies to study the influence of bars in the building of galaxy bulges. Line strength indices were measured and used to derive age and metallicity gradients in the bulge region by comparing with stellar population models. The same analysis was also carried out with similar data of unbarred galaxies taken from the literature. The bulges of barred galaxies seem to be more metal rich, at a given velocity dispersion (sigma), than the bulges of unbarred galaxies, as measured by some metallicity sensitive indices. There are indications that the ratio of relative abundance of alpha-elements with respect to iron, [E/Fe], derived for the bulges of barred galaxies tend to lie above the values of the unbarred galaxies at a given sigma. The metallicity gradients for the majority of the bulges are negative, less metal rich towards the end of the bulge. The gradient values show a large scatter for galaxies with sigma below 150 km/s. The age distribution is related to the presence of bulge substructure such as a nuclear ring or an inner disk. The metallicity of both the bulge and the bar are very well correlated indicating a close link between the enrichment histories of both components. Bulges of barred early type galaxies might have suffered a different chemical enrichment compared to the bulges of unbarred galaxies of the same morphological type, same central velocity dispersion and low inclination angles. The hinted stellar populations differences separating the bulges of barred and unbarred galaxies and the strong link existing between the metallicity of the bulge and the presence of a bar points to scenarios were they both form simultaneously in processes leading to rapid and massive episodes of star formation, possibly linked to the bar formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Near-Optimally Teaching the Crowd to Classify

How should we present training examples to learners to teach them classification rules? This is a natural problem when training workers for crowdsourcing labeling tasks, and is also motivated by challenges in data-driven online education. We propose a natural stochastic model of the learners, modeling them as randomly switching among hypotheses based on observed feedback. We then develop STRICT, an efficient algorithm for selecting examples to teach to workers. Our solution greedily maximizes a submodular surrogate objective function in order to select examples to show to the learners. We prove that our strategy is competitive with the optimal teaching policy. Moreover, for the special case of linear separators, we prove that an exponential reduction in error probability can be achieved. Our experiments on simulated workers as well as three real image annotation tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk show the effectiveness of our teaching algorithm

Temperature Structure of the Intra-Cluster Medium from SPH and AMR simulations

Analyses of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy clusters suggest that X-ray masses can be underestimated by 10% to 30%. The largest bias originates by both violation of hydrostatic equilibrium and an additional temperature bias caused by inhomogeneities in the X-ray emitting intra-cluster medium (ICM). To elucidate on this large dispersion among theoretical predictions, we evaluate the degree of temperature structures in cluster sets simulated either with smoothed-particle-hydrodynamics (SPH) and adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) codes. We find that the SPH simulations produce larger temperature variations connected to the persistence of both substructures and their stripped cold gas. This difference is more evident in no-radiative simulations, while it is reduced in the presence of radiative cooling. We also find that the temperature variation in radiative cluster simulations is generally in agreement with the observed one in the central regions of clusters. Around R_500 the temperature inhomogeneities of the SPH simulations can generate twice the typical hydrostatic-equilibrium mass bias of the AMR sample. We emphasize that a detailed understanding of the physical processes responsible for the complex thermal structure in ICM requires improved resolution and high sensitivity observations in order to extend the analysis to higher temperature systems and larger cluster-centric radii.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Microeconomic Effects of Capital Controls: The Chilean Experience During the 1990s.

This paper studies the experience with the use of capital controls in Chile during the 1990s. Rather than revisiting previous studies, it complements previous research by providing, for the first time, empirical evidence on some of the microeconomic effects of capital controls, in particular, the unremunerated reserve requirement (URR). By looking at financial statements for a group of 73 Chilean firms during 1986-2001, the paper attempts to identify the effects of the URR on the firms’ costs and ways of financing. Chilean firms are grouped by economic sector, size and access to international capital markets. Results show that the effects of the URR are firm specific; forinstance, there are striking differences in the response to the URR among firms of different size and those with or without access to international capital markets.

Faint recombination lines in Galactic PNe with [WC] nucleus

We present spatially resolved high-resolution spectrophotometric data for the planetary nebulae PB8, NGC2867, and PB6. We have analyzed two knots in NGC2867 and PB6 and one in PB8. The three nebulae are ionized by [WC] type nuclei: early [WO] for PB6 and NGC2867 and [WC 5-6] in the case of PB8. Our aim is to study the behavior of the abundance discrepancy problem (ADF) in this type of PNe. We measured a large number of optical recombination (ORL) and collisionally excited lines (CEL), from different ionization stages (many more than in any previous work), thus, we were able to derive physical conditions from many different diagnostic procedures. We determined ionic abundances from the available collisionally excited lines and recombination lines. Based on both sets of ionic abundances, we derived total chemical abundances in the nebulae using suitable ionization correction factors. From CELs, we have found abundances typical of Galactic disk planetary nebulae. Moderate ADF(O++) were found for PB8 (2.57) and NGC2867 (1.63). For NGC2867, abundances from ORLs are higher but still consistent with Galactic disk planetary nebulae. On the contrary, PB8 presents a very high O/H ratio from ORLs. A high C/O was obtained from ORLs for NGC2867; this ratio is similar to C/O obtained from CELs and with the chemical composition of the wind of the central star, indicating that there was no further C-enrichment in the star, relative to O, after the nebular material ejection. On the contrary, we found C/O<1 in PB8. Interestingly, we obtain (C/O)ORLs/(C/O)CELs < 1 in PB8 and NGC2867; this added to the similarity between the heliocentric velocities measured in [OIII] and OII lines for our three objects, argue against the presence of H-deficient metal-rich knots coming from a late thermal pulse event.Comment: 25 pages, 13 Tables, 4 Figures Accepted for publication in A&A. First page is blank for obscure latex reason

Spatially resolved spectroscopy of Coma cluster early-type galaxies IV. Completing the dataset

The long-slit spectra obtained along the minor axis, offset major axis and diagonal axis are presented for 12 E and S0 galaxies of the Coma cluster drawn from a magnitude-limited sample studied before. The rotation curves, velocity dispersion profiles and the H_3 and H_4 coefficients of the Hermite decomposition of the line of sight velocity distribution are derived. The radial profiles of the Hbeta, Mg, and Fe line strength indices are measured too. In addition, the surface photometry of the central regions of a subsample of 4 galaxies recently obtained with Hubble Space Telescope is presented. The data will be used to construct dynamical models of the galaxies and study their stellar populations.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ