39 research outputs found
Discovery of extreme particle acceleration in the microquasar Cygnus X-3
The study of relativistic particle acceleration is a major topic of
high-energy astrophysics. It is well known that massive black holes in active
galaxies can release a substantial fraction of their accretion power into
energetic particles, producing gamma-rays and relativistic jets. Galactic
microquasars (hosting a compact star of 1-10 solar masses which accretes matter
from a binary companion) also produce relativistic jets. However, no direct
evidence of particle acceleration above GeV energies has ever been obtained in
microquasar ejections, leaving open the issue of the occurrence and timing of
extreme matter energization during jet formation. Here we report the detection
of transient gamma-ray emission above 100 MeV from the microquasar Cygnus X-3,
an exceptional X-ray binary which sporadically produces powerful radio jets.
Four gamma-ray flares (each lasting 1-2 days) were detected by the AGILE
satellite simultaneously with special spectral states of Cygnus X-3 during the
period mid-2007/mid-2009. Our observations show that very efficient particle
acceleration and gamma-ray propagation out of the inner disk of a microquasar
usually occur a few days before major relativistic jet ejections. Flaring
particle energies can be thousands of times larger than previously detected
maximum values (with Lorentz factors of 105 and 102 for electrons and protons,
respectively). We show that the transitional nature of gamma-ray flares and
particle acceleration above GeV energies in Cygnus X-3 is clearly linked to
special radio/X-ray states preceding strong radio flares. Thus gamma-rays
provide unique insight into the nature of physical processes in microquasars.Comment: 29 pages (including Supplementary Information), 8 figures, 2 tables
version submitted to Nature on August 7, 2009 (accepted version available at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nature08578.pdf
Molecular structure, electrochemical behaviour, and NK XANES of 1,4-bis(pyrrol-1-yl-carbonyl)benzene
Mercury complexes of an N-heterocyclic carbene derived from a calixarene/azolium cyclophane hybrid
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015.Reaction of mercuric acetate with an imidazolium-linked cyclophane incorporating 2,6-phenolic moieties results in formation of an interesting new N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) complex of mercury. The new complex is cationic and binuclear, incorporating two mercury centres and two bis(NHC) ligands, each mercury atom being bound by two NHC moieties and two phenol/phenoxy moieties. Forms of the complex having coordinating ((Formula presented.))and non-coordinating ((Formula presented.))counterions have been structurally characterised
A general and flexible method for signal extraction from single-cell RNA-seq data
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data provides information on transcriptomic heterogeneity within cell populations. Here, Risso et al develop ZINB-WaVE for low-dimensional representations of scRNA-seq data that account for zero inflation, over-dispersion, and the count nature of the data