2,099 research outputs found
Dean MacKay Takes Well Earned Vacation
There will be a vacant chair at the council table of the Home Economics Division of Iowa State College this coming year. Dean Catherine J. MacKay will be away
The extinction by dust in the outer parts of spiral galaxies
To investigate the distribution of dust in Sb and Sc galaxies we have
analyzed near-infrared and optical surface photometry for an unbiased sample of
37 galaxies. Since light in the -band is very little affected by extinction
by dust, the colour is a good indicator of the amount of extinction, and
using the colour-inclination relation we can statistically determine the
extinction for an average Sb/Sc galaxy. We find in general a considerable
amount of extinction in spiral galaxies in the central regions, all the way out
to their effective radii. In the outer parts, at D, or at 3 times the
typical exponential scale lengths of the stellar distribution , we find a
maximum optical depth of 0.5 in for a face-on galaxy. If we impose the
condition that the dust is distributed in the same way as the stars, this upper
limit would go down to 0.1.Comment: 4 pages, postscript, gzip-compressed, uuencoded, includes 2 figures.
Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Letter
Biofuels and their By-Products: Global Economic and Environmental Implications
The biofuel industry has been rapidly growing around the world in recent years. Several papers have used general equilibrium models and addressed the economy-wide and environmental consequences of producing biofuels at a large scale. They mainly argue that since biofuels are mostly produced from agricultural sources, their effects are largely felt in agricultural markets with major land use and environmental consequences. In this paper, we argue that virtually all of these studies have overstated the impact of liquid biofuels on agricultural markets due to the fact that they have ignored the role of by-products resulting from the production of biofuels. Feed by-products of the biofuel industry, such as Dried Distillers Grains with Solubles (DDGS) and biodiesel by-products (BDBP) such as soy and rapeseed meals, can be used in the livestock industry as substitutes for grains and oilseed meals used in this industry. Hence, their presence mitigates the price impacts of biofuel production on the livestock and food industries. The importance of incorporating by-products of biofuel production in economic models is well recognized by some partial equilibrium analyses of biofuel production. However, to date, this issue has not been tackled by those conducting CGE analysis of biofuels programs. Accordingly, this paper explicitly introduces DDGS and BDBP, the major by-products of grain based ethanol and biodiesel production processes, into a worldwide CGE model and analyzes the economic and environmental impacts of regional and international mandate policies designed to stimulate bioenergy production and use. We first explicitly introduce by-products of biofuel production into the GTAP-BIO database, originally developed by Taheripour et al. (2007). Then we explicitly bring in DDGS and BDBP into the Energy-Environmental version of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP-E) model, originally developed by Burniaux and Truong (2002), and recently modified by McDougall and Golub (2007) and Birur, Hertel, and Tyner (2008). The structure of the GTAP-E model is redesigned to handle the production and consumption of biofuels and their by-products, in particular DDGS, across the world. Unlike many CGE models which are characterized by single product sectors, here grain based ethanol and DDGS jointly are produced by an industry, named EthanolC. The biodiesel industry also produces two products of biodiesel and BDBP jointly. This paper divides the world economy into 22 commodities, 20 industries, and 18 regions and then examines global impacts of the US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and the European Union mandates for promoting biofuel production in the presence of by-products. We show that models with and without by-products demonstrate different portraits from the economic impacts of international biofuel mandates for the world economy in 2015. While both models demonstrate significant changes in the agricultural production pattern across the world, the model with by-products shows smaller changes in the production of cereal grains and larger changes for oilseeds products in the US and EU, and the reverse for Brazil. For example, the US production of cereal grains increases by 10.8% and 16.4% with and without by-products, respectively. The difference between these two numbers corresponds to 646 million bushels of corn. In the presence of by-products, prices change less due to the mandate policies. For example, the model with no by-products predicts that the price of cereal grains grows 22.7% in the US during the time period of 2006 to 2015. The corresponding number for the model with by-products is 14%. The model with no by-products predicts that the price of oilseeds increases by 62.5% in the EU during 2006-2015. In the presence of by-products, this price grows 56.4%. Finally, we show that incorporating DDGS into the model significantly changes the land use consequences of the biofuel mandate polices.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy,
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Observations of the J = 2â1 transitions of <sup>12</sup>C<sup>16</sup>O and <sup>12</sup>C<sup>18</sup>O towards galactic H II regions
Observations are reported of the J = 2â1 transitions of CO and 12C18O at 230 and 219 GHz respectively from a number of galactic sources. A map of the central 1/2° Ă 1/2° of the Orion A molecular cloud is presented. The spectra are interpreted to derive molecular densities and abundance ratios in the molecular clouds observed
Mixed Early and Late-Type Properties in the Bar of NGC 6221: Evidence for Evolution along the Hubble Sequence?
Rotation curves and velocity dispersion profiles are presented for both the
stellar and gaseous components along five different position angles (P.A.=5,
50, 95, 125 and 155 degrees) of the nearby barred spiral NGC 6221. The observed
kinematics extends out to about 80" from the nucleus. Narrow and broad-band
imaging is also presented. The radial profiles of the fluxes ratio [NII]/Halpha
reveal the presence of a ring-like structure of ionized gas, with a radius of
about 9" and a deprojected circular velocity of about 280 km/s. The analysis of
the dynamics of the bar indicates this ring is related to the presence of an
inner Lindblad resonance (ILR) at 1.3 kpc. NGC6221 is found to exhibit
intermediate properties between those of the early-type barred galaxies: the
presence of a gaseous ring at an ILR, the bar edge located between the ILR's
and the corotation radius beyond the steep rising portion of the rotation
curve, the dust-lane pattern, and those of the late-type galaxies: an almost
exponential surface brightness profile, the presence of Halpha regions along
all the bar, the spiral-arm pattern. It is consistent with scenarios of
bar-induced evolution from later to earlier-type galaxies.Comment: 1 File ds7406.tar.gz which contains: one latex file (ds7406.tex), and
10 encsulated postscript figures (ds7406f**.eps). To be compiled with aa-l
latex2e macro style. To be published in A&A Sup. Serie
Stability of undissociated screw dislocations in zinc-blende covalent materials from first principle simulations
The properties of perfect screw dislocations have been investigated for
several zinc-blende materials such as diamond, Si, -SiC, Ge and GaAs, by
performing first principles calculations. For almost all elements, a core
configuration belonging to shuffle set planes is favored, in agreement with low
temperature experiments. Only for diamond, a glide configuration has the lowest
defect energy, thanks to an sp hybridization in the core
The Mini Astrophysical MEV Background Observatory (MAMBO): A CubeSat Mission for Gamma-ray Astronomy
A major star formation region in the receding tip of the stellar Galactic bar. II. Supplementary information and evidence that the bar is not the same structure as the triaxial bulge previouly reported
This paper is the second part of Garzon et al. (1997: ApJ 491, L31) in which
we presented an outline of the analysis of 60 spectra from a follow-up program
to the Two Micron Galactic Survey (TMGS) project in the l=27 deg., b=0 deg.
area. In this second part, we present a more detailed explanation of the
analysis as well a library of the spectra for more complete information for
each of the 60 stars, and further discussions on the implications for the
structure of the Galaxy.
This region contains a prominent excess in the flux distribution and star
counts previously observed in several spectral ranges, notably in the TMGS.
More than 50% of the spectra of the stars detected with m_K<5.0 mag, within a
very high confidence level, correspond to stars of luminosity class I, and a
significant proportion of the remainder are very late giants which must also be
rapidly evolving. We make the case, using all the available evidence, that we
are observing a region at the nearer end of the Galactic bar, where the Scutum
spiral arm breaks away, and that this is powerful evidence for the presence of
the bar. Alternative explanations do not give nearly such a satisfactory
account of the observations.
The space localization of one and, a fortiori, of both ends of the bar allows
us to infer a position angle for the bar of around 75 deg. with respect to the
Sun-Galactic centre line. The angle is different from that given by other
authors for the bar and this, we think, is because they refer to the triaxial
bulge and not to the bar as detected here.Comment: 21 pages, 1 table, 9 figures, accepted in A
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