3,654 research outputs found
Foraging movements of emperor penguins at Pointe Géologie, Antarctica.
International audienceThe foraging distributions of 20 breeding emperor penguins were investigated at Pointe Ge´ologie, Terre Ade´lie, Antarctica by using satellite telemetry in 2005 and 2006 during early and late winter, as well as during late spring and summer, corresponding to incubation, early chick-brooding, late chick-rearing and the adult pre-moult period, respectively. Dive depth records of three post-egg-laying females, two post-incubating males and four late chick-rearing adults were examined, as well as the horizontal space use by these birds. Foraging ranges of chick-provisioning penguins extended over the Antarctic shelf and were constricted by winter pack-ice. During spring ice break-up, the foraging ranges rarely exceeded the shelf slope, although seawater access was apparently almost unlimited. Winter females appeared constrained in their access to open water but used fissures in the sea ice and expanded their prey search effort by expanding the horizontal search component underwater. Birds in spring however, showed higher area-restricted-search than did birds in winter. Despite different seasonal foraging strategies, chick-rearing penguins exploited similar areas as indicated by both a high ‘Area-Restricted-Search Index' and high ‘Catch Per Unit Effort'. During pre-moult trips, emperor penguins ranged much farther offshore than breeding birds, which argues for particularly profitable oceanic feeding areas which can be exploited when the time constraints imposed by having to return to a central place to provision the chick no longer apply
Ultra-Low Amplitude Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud
The MACHO variables of LMC Field 77 that lie in the vicinity of the Cepheid
instability strip are reexamined. Among the 144 variables that we identify as
Cepheids we find 14 that have Fourier amplitudes <0.05 mag in the MACHO red
band, of which 7 have an amplitude <0.006 mag : we dub the latter group of
stars ultra-low amplitude (ULA) Cepheids. The variability of these objects is
verified by a comparison of the MACHO red with the MACHO blue lightcurves and
with those of the corresponding OGLE LMC stars. The occurrence of ULA Cepheids
is in agreement with theory. We have also discovered 2 low amplitude variables
whose periods are about a factor of 5--6 smaller than those of F Cepheids of
equal apparent magnitude. We suggest that these objects are Cepheids undergoing
pulsations in a surface mode and that they belong to a novel class of Strange
Cepheids (or Surface Mode Cepheids) whose existence was predicted by Buchler et
al. (1997).Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, slightly revised, to appear in ApJ Letter
The Star Blended with the MOA-2008-BLG-310 Source Is Not the Exoplanet Host Star
High resolution Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image analysis of the
MOA-2008-BLG-310 microlens system indicates that the excess flux at the
location of the source found in the discovery paper cannot primarily be due to
the lens star because it does not match the lens-source relative proper motion,
, predicted by the microlens models. This excess flux is most
likely to be due to an unrelated star that happens to be located in close
proximity to the source star. Two epochs of HST observations indicate proper
motion for this blend star that is typical of a random bulge star, but is not
consistent with a companion to the source or lens stars if the flux is
dominated by only one star, aside from the lens. We consider models in which
the excess flux is due to a combination of an unrelated star and the lens star,
and this yields 95\% confidence level upper limit on the lens star brightness
of and . A Bayesian analysis using a standard
Galactic model and these magnitude limits yields a host star mass , a planet mass of at a projected separation of AU. This result illustrates excess flux in a high
resolution image of a microlens-source system need not be due to the lens. It
is important to check that the lens-source relative proper motion is consistent
with the microlensing prediction. The high resolution image analysis techniques
developed in this paper can be used to verify the WFIRST exoplanet microlensing
survey mass measurements.Comment: Submitted to AJ on March 18, 201
Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Events
We present previously unpublished photometry of three Large Magellanic Cloud
(LMC) microlensing events and show that the new photometry confirms the
microlensing interpretation of these events. These events were discovered by
the MACHO Project alert system and were also recovered by the analysis of the
5.7 year MACHO data set. This new photometry provides a substantial increase in
the signal-to-noise ratio over the previously published photometry and in all
three cases, the gravitational microlensing interpretation of these events is
strengthened. The new data consist of MACHO-Global Microlensing Alert Network
(GMAN) follow-up images from the CTIO 0.9 telescope plus difference imaging
photometry of the original MACHO data from the 1.3m "Great Melbourne" telescope
at Mt. Stromlo. We also combine microlensing light curve fitting with
photometry from high resolution HST images of the source stars to provide
further confirmation of these events and to show that the microlensing
interpretation of event MACHO-LMC-23 is questionable. Finally, we compare our
results with the analysis of Belokurov, Evans & Le Du who have attempted to
classify candidate microlensing events with a neural network method, and we
find that their results are contradicted by the new data and more powerful
light curve fitting analysis for each of the four events considered in this
paper. The failure of the Belokurov, Evans & Le Du method is likely to be due
to their use of a set of insensitive statistics to feed their neural networks.Comment: 29 pages with 8 included postscript figures, accepted by the
Astrophysical Journa
Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Optical Depth with Imperfect Event Selection
I present a new analysis of the MACHO Project 5.7 year Large Magellanic Cloud
(LMC) microlensing data set that incorporates the effects of contamination of
the microlensing event sample by variable stars. Photometric monitoring of
MACHO LMC microlensing event candidates by the EROS and OGLE groups has
revealed that one of these events is likely to be a variable star, while
additional data has confirmed that many of the other events are very likely to
be microlensing. This additional data on the nature of the MACHO microlensing
candidates is incorporated into a simple likelihood analysis to derive a
probability distribution for the number of MACHO microlens candidates that are
true microlensing events. This analysis shows that 10-12 of the 13 events that
passed the MACHO selection criteria are likely to be microlensing events, with
the other 1-3 being variable stars. This likelihood analysis is also used to
show that the main conclusions of the MACHO LMC analysis are unchanged by the
variable star contamination. The microlensing optical depth toward the LMC is =
1.0 +/- 0.3 * 10^{-7}. If this is due to microlensing by known stellar
populations, plus an additional population of lens objects in the Galactic
halo, then the new halo population would account for 16% of the mass of a
standard Galactic halo. The MACHO detection exceeds the expected background of
2 events expected from ordinary stars in standard models of the Milky Way and
LMC at the 99.98% confidence level. The background prediction is increased to 3
events if maximal disk models are assumed for both the MilkyWay and LMC, but
this model fails to account for the full signal seen by MACHO at the 99.8%
confidence level.Comment: 20 pages, 2 postscript figues, accepted by Ap
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