Neutron Star Planets: Atmospheric processes and habitability

Of the roughly 3000 neutron stars known, only a handful have sub-stellar companions. The most famous of these are the low-mass planets around the millisecond pulsar B1257+12. New evidence indicates that observational biases could still hide a wide variety of planetary systems around most neutron stars. We consider the environment and physical processes relevant to neutron star planets, in particular the effect of X-ray irradiation and the relativistic pulsar wind on the planetary atmosphere. We discuss the survival time of planet atmospheres and the planetary surface conditions around different classes of neutron stars, and define a neutron star habitable zone. Depending on as-yet poorly constrained aspects of the pulsar wind, both Super-Earths around B1257+12 could lie within its habitable zone.Comment: Submitted to A&

Spirals in protoplanetary disks from photon travel time

Spiral structures are a common feature in scattered-light images of protoplanetary disks, and of great interest as possible tracers of the presence of planets. However, other mechanisms have been put foward to explain them, including self-gravity, disk-envelope interactions, and dead zone boundaries. These mechanisms explain many spirals very well, but are unable to easily account for very loosely wound spirals and single spiral arms. We study the effect of light travel time on the shape of a shadow cast by a clump orbiting close (within ${\sim}1\,$au) of the central star, where there can be significant orbital motion during the light travel time from the clump to the outer disk and then to the sky plane. This delay in light rays reaching the sky plane gives rise to a variety of spiral- and arc-shaped shadows, which we describe with a general fitting formula for a flared, inclined disk.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A Letters. Videos available at dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3526708/spiralmovies.zi

Relocation of remains : scavenger patterns in north central Oklahoma.

The processes by which clandestine remains are scattered and destroyed by vertebrate necrophagus scavenging behaviors are significant to forensic death investigations, in terms of focusing search techniques, improving remains recovery, and contributing to more timely and successful case resolution. This research was derived directly from field work involving cases of scavenged remains where recovery was highly incomplete, leaving a question of whether scorch techniques were inadequate or if the remains had been destroyed and were simply irrecoverable. This study utilized domestic pig (Sus scrofa) carcasses placed at a wildlife conservation area during three different seasons, to assess members of the scavenger guild of the area, their associated behavior, and related effect on remains to address these issues. Carcasses were observed by digital video, motion triggered, game cameras, and site visits. Biological radio telemetry transmitters, which are typically used to track living wildlife, were implanted in carcasses to assess long distance movement of skeletal elements. It was shown that that were three main participants in the vertebrate scavenger guild, the coyote (Canis latrans), the Virginia opossum (Didelphis viriginianen), and the bobcat (Lynx rufus). Each of these species left unique taphonomic identifiers on the carcasses. They also contributed significantly to the destruction and dispersal of skeletal elements. There an clear patterns in time of carcass acquisition, tissues consumed by each species, and the subsequent dispersal of elements caused by each activity. Scavenging drastically increases time to skeletonization over comparable controls and highly effects estimations of post-deposition interval. Further research is needed to understand if these patterns are similar in human adult remains and other ecoregions

The methanol lines and hot core of OMC2-FIR4, an intermediate-mass protostar, with Herschel/HIFI

In contrast with numerous studies on the physical and chemical structure of low- and high-mass protostars, much less is known about their intermediate-mass counterparts, a class of objects that could help to elucidate the mechanisms of star formation on both ends of the mass range. We present the first results from a rich HIFI spectral dataset on an intermediate-mass protostar, OMC2-FIR4, obtained in the CHESS (Chemical HErschel Survey of Star forming regions) key programme. The more than 100 methanol lines detected between 554 and 961 GHz cover a range in upper level energy of 40 to 540 K. Our physical interpretation focusses on the hot core, but likely the cold envelope and shocked regions also play a role in reality, because an analysis of the line profiles suggests the presence of multiple emission components. An upper limit of 10^(-6) is placed on the methanol abundance in the hot core, using a population diagram, large-scale source model and other considerations. This value is consistent with abundances previously seen in low-mass hot cores. Furthermore, the highest energy lines at the highest frequencies display asymmetric profiles, which may arise from infall around the hot core

Enterprise architecture development and implementation in public sector: The Malaysian perspective

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is gaining the attention from the public sector as a solution to improve the function of e-Government. However, public sector agencies are having difficulties with its development and implementation due to inflexibility and complexity of the agencies’ business function and information technology structures. The objective of this paper is to identify the challenges faced by the Malaysian public sector agencies that are in development and implementation phase of EA. In order to get the holistic perspective of EA development and implementation scenario in each organisation, a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach is applied. A multiple case study research approach is utilized to achieve this study objective. Data were collected through interviews with the agencies EA team, general observation during the EA workshops as well as review of EA related documents. The result shows there are twenty challenges identified which is consistent with other challenges stated in literature except for talent management issue. Thus, this provides a new insight on how the public sector should implement their EA as compared to any other organisation

Searching for a dusty cometary belt around TRAPPIST-1 with ALMA

Low-mass stars might offer today the best opportunities to detect and characterize planetary systems, especially those harbouring close-in low-mass temperate planets. Among those stars, TRAPPIST-1 is exceptional since it has seven Earth-sized planets, of which three could sustain liquid water on their surfaces. Here we present new and deep ALMA observations of TRAPPIST-1 to look for an exo-Kuiper belt which can provide clues about the formation and architecture of this system. Our observations at 0.88 mm did not detect dust emission, but can place an upper limit of 23 µJy if the belt is smaller than 4 au, and 0.15 mJy if resolved and 100 au in radius. These limits correspond to low dust masses of ̃10-5 to 10-2 M⊕, which are expected after 8 Gyr of collisional evolution unless the system was born with a >20 M⊕ belt of 100 km-sized planetesimals beyond 40 au or suffered a dynamical instability. This 20 M⊕ mass upper limit is comparable to the combined mass in TRAPPIST-1 planets, thus it is possible that most of the available solid mass in this system was used to form the known planets. A similar analysis of the ALMA data on Proxima Cen leads us to conclude that a belt born with a mass ≳1 M⊕ in 100 km-sized planetesimals could explain its putative outer belt at 30 au. We recommend that future characterizations of debris discs around low-mass stars should focus on nearby and young systems if possible

An IoT based home automation integrated approach: impact on society in sustainable development perspective

In recent years, due to substantial evolution in the field of consumer electronics, the society is striving to optimize efficiency, energy savings, green technology and environmental sustainability in their daily lives at homes. Most of the people are controlling and monitoring home appliances manually and therefore, facing lots of problems in managing natural resources, cost, effort and security which lead towards an un-comfortable and un-reliable life. Numerous 'intelligent' devices such as smartphones, tablets, air-conditioners, etc. have promoted the key concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) based home automation. Entrenched with technology, these devices can be distantly monitored and controlled over the Internet at home and anywhere in the world. Over the past few decades, global warming has become a severe worldwide challenge. However, sustainable development and green technology play an important role in climate change. The primary purpose of this study is to save natural resources, reduce energy consumption, and to understand the impact of home automation on the society in order to achieve the goal of green technology and environmental sustainability. In this paper, IoT based home automation approach integrated with the smart meter, solar, wind, geothermal renewable energy resources and government green awareness program to extensively optimize the need of energy consumption, security, cost, convenience and cleaner environment for the society is proposed. In addition, a survey was conducted among the target audience for the purpose of identifying and evaluating its least impact on the environment and society in a sustainable development perspective. The results of this survey are statistically analyzed using IBM SPSS statistics version 23. The results revealed that there is a significant impact of home automation on the society thereby contributing to its solution

Religiousity Choosen: Was It Affected to Young Generation's Election Behavior?

To assess the influence of religious faith, especially Islam, to the point of view and election behavior on the young generation, this research is focused upon UPI students was carried out by applying the associative causal method and quantitative approach. By taking samples to youngest students as voter novice which is determined by probability sampling,  the result proved that there is a significant influence of the religious aspect to election behavior among students of UPI. But, it seems that religious faith isn’t a dominant factor. It can be seen from how major of the influence of religious faith to the election behavior was only 11.9 %. So that, it is recommended that as the effort to give political understanding and implementation for young generations of Moslem, religion need to be implemented holistically, not partial, to avoid misinterpretation on Islamic terms and laws that as the basis of the political participation proces

Shedding light on the formation of the pre-biotic molecule formamide with ASAI

Formamide (NH2CHO) has been proposed as a pre-biotic precursor with a key role in the emergence of life on Earth. While this molecule has been observed in space, most of its detections correspond to high-mass star-forming regions. Motivated by this lack of investigation in the low-mass regime, we searched for formamide, as well as isocyanic acid (HNCO), in 10 low- and intermediate-mass pre-stellar and protostellar objects. The present work is part of the IRAM Large Programme ASAI (Astrochemical Surveys At IRAM), which makes use of unbiased broadband spectral surveys at millimetre wavelengths. We detected HNCO in all the sources and NH2CHO in five of them. We derived their abundances and analysed them together with those reported in the literature for high-mass sources. For those sources with formamide detection, we found a tight and almost linear correlation between HNCO and NH2CHO abundances, with their ratio being roughly constant -between 3 and 10- across 6 orders of magnitude in luminosity. This suggests the two species are chemically related. The sources without formamide detection, which are also the coldest and devoid of hot corinos, fall well off the correlation, displaying a much larger amount of HNCO relative to NH2CHO. Our results suggest that, while HNCO can be formed in the gas phase during the cold stages of star formation, NH2CHO forms most efficiently on the mantles of dust grains at these temperatures, where it remains frozen until the temperature rises enough to sublimate the icy grain mantles. We propose hydrogenation of HNCO as a likely formation route leading to NH2CHO.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures. Accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

Assessing the Capability and Priority of Enterprise Architecture Implementation in Malaysian Public Sector

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an integrated approach of information systems, processes, organisation and people in aligning business and information technology together. However, there is a discrepancy in public sector EA implementation whereby the developing countries are still grappling with issues in the implementation while those developed countries are already harvesting the EA benefits and value. Hence, this study aims to investigate the capability and priority of public sector of the developing countries in implementing the EA by proposing an assessment model. The assessment model is based on Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. There are 27 EAI capability and priority criteria identified and grouped into six categories according to BSC perspectives namely Internal Process, Learning and Growth, Authority Support, Cost, Technology and Talent Management. Followed by AHP pairwise comparison in calculating the rank of each criterion which is presented via three case studies from Malaysian Public Sector agencies