31,389 research outputs found
Hipparcos distances of Ophiuchus and Lupus cloud complexes
We combine extinction maps from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) with
Hipparcos and Tycho parallaxes to obtain reliable and high-precision estimates
of the distance to the Ophiuchus and Lupus dark complexes. Our analysis, based
on a rigorous maximum-likelihood approach, shows that the rho-Ophiuchi cloud is
located at (119 +/- 6) pc and the Lupus complex is located at (155 +/- 8) pc;
in addition, we are able to put constraints on the thickness of the clouds and
on their orientation on the sky (both these effects are not included in the
error estimate quoted above). For Ophiuchus, we find some evidence that the
streamers are closer to us than the core. The method applied in this paper is
currently limited to nearby molecular clouds, but it will find many natural
applications in the GAIA-era, when it will be possible to pin down the distance
and three-dimensional structure of virtually every molecular cloud in the
Galaxy.Comment: A&A in press - Corrected typo (Lupus distance) in the electronic
abstrac
The mid-infrared extinction law in the darkest cores of the Pipe Nebula
Context. The properties of dust grains, in particular their size
distribution, are expected to differ from the interstellar medium to the
high-density regions within molecular clouds. Aims. We measure the mid-infrared
extinction law produced by dense material in molecular cloud cores. Since the
extinction at these wavelengths is caused by dust, the extinction law in cores
should depart from that found in low-density environments if the dust grains
have different properties. Methods. We use the unbiased LINES method to measure
the slope of the reddening vectors in color-color diagrams. We derive the
mid-infrared extinction law toward the dense cores B59 and FeSt 1-457 in the
Pipe Nebula over a range of visual extinction between 10 and 50 magnitudes,
using a combination of Spitzer/IRAC, and ESO NTT/VLT data. Results. The
mid-infrared extinction law in both cores departs significantly from a
power-law between 3.6 and 8 micron, suggesting that these cores contain dust
with a considerable fraction of large dust grains. We find no evidence for a
dependence of the extinction law with column density up to 50 magnitudes of
visual extinction in these cores, and no evidence for a variation between our
result and those for other clouds at lower column densities reported elsewhere
in the literature. This suggests that either large grains are present even in
low column density regions, or that the existing dust models need to be revised
at mid-infrared wavelengths. We find a small but significant difference in the
extinction law of the two cores, that we tentatively associate with the onset
of star formation in B59.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Accepted to A&
Fisher matrix forecasts for astrophysical tests of the stability of the fine-structure constant
We use Fisher Matrix analysis techniques to forecast the cosmological impact
of astrophysical tests of the stability of the fine-structure constant to be
carried out by the forthcoming ESPRESSO spectrograph at the VLT (due for
commissioning in late 2017), as well by the planned high-resolution
spectrograph (currently in Phase A) for the European Extremely Large Telescope.
Assuming a fiducial model without variations, we show that ESPRESSO
can improve current bounds on the E\"{o}tv\"{o}s parameter---which quantifies
Weak Equivalence Principle violations---by up to two orders of magnitude,
leading to stronger bounds than those expected from the ongoing tests with the
MICROSCOPE satellite, while constraints from the E-ELT should be competitive
with those of the proposed STEP satellite. Should an variation be
detected, these measurements will further constrain cosmological parameters,
being particularly sensitive to the dynamics of dark energy.Comment: Phys. Lett. B (in press
On the origins of scaling corrections in ballistic growth models
We study the ballistic deposition and the grain deposition models on
two-dimensional substrates. Using the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) ansatz for
height fluctuations, we show that the main contribution to the intrinsic width,
which causes strong corrections to the scaling, comes from the fluctuations in
the height increments along deposition events. Accounting for this correction
in the scaling analysis, we obtained scaling exponents in excellent agreement
with the KPZ class. We also propose a method to suppress these corrections,
which consists in divide the surface in bins of size and use only
the maximal height inside each bin to do the statistics. Again, scaling
exponents in remarkable agreement with the KPZ class were found. The binning
method allowed the accurate determination of the height distributions of the
ballistic models in both growth and steady state regimes, providing the
universal underlying fluctuations foreseen for KPZ class in 2+1 dimensions. Our
results provide complete and conclusive evidences that the ballistic model
belongs to the KPZ universality class in dimensions. Potential
applications of the methods developed here, in both numerics and experiments,
are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
- …