Discovery and Follow-up Observations of the Young Type Ia Supernova 2016coj

The Type~Ia supernova (SN~Ia) 2016coj in NGC 4125 (redshift $z=0.004523$) was discovered by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search 4.9 days after the fitted first-light time (FFLT; 11.1 days before $B$-band maximum). Our first detection (pre-discovery) is merely $0.6\pm0.5$ day after the FFLT, making SN 2016coj one of the earliest known detections of a SN Ia. A spectrum was taken only 3.7 hr after discovery (5.0 days after the FFLT) and classified as a normal SN Ia. We performed high-quality photometry, low- and high-resolution spectroscopy, and spectropolarimetry, finding that SN 2016coj is a spectroscopically normal SN Ia, but with a high velocity of \ion{Si}{2} $\lambda$6355 ($\sim 12,600$\,\kms\ around peak brightness). The \ion{Si}{2} $\lambda$6355 velocity evolution can be well fit by a broken-power-law function for up to a month after the FFLT. SN 2016coj has a normal peak luminosity ($M_B \approx -18.9 \pm 0.2$ mag), and it reaches a $B$-band maximum \about16.0~d after the FFLT. We estimate there to be low host-galaxy extinction based on the absence of Na~I~D absorption lines in our low- and high-resolution spectra. The spectropolarimetric data exhibit weak polarization in the continuum, but the \ion{Si}{2} line polarization is quite strong ($\sim 0.9\% \pm 0.1\%$) at peak brightness.Comment: Submitte

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016: Dynamical Modeling of Velocity-Resolved H\b{eta} Lags in Luminous Seyfert Galaxies

We have modeled the velocity-resolved reverberation response of the H\b{eta} broad emission line in nine Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Lick Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) Monitioring Project 2016 sample, drawing inferences on the geometry and structure of the low-ionization broad-line region (BLR) and the mass of the central supermassive black hole. Overall, we find that the H\b{eta} BLR is generally a thick disk viewed at low to moderate inclination angles. We combine our sample with prior studies and investigate line-profile shape dependence, such as log10(FWHM/{\sigma}), on BLR structure and kinematics and search for any BLR luminosity-dependent trends. We find marginal evidence for an anticorrelation between the profile shape of the broad H\b{eta} emission line and the Eddington ratio, when using the root-mean-square spectrum. However, we do not find any luminosity-dependent trends, and conclude that AGNs have diverse BLR structure and kinematics, consistent with the hypothesis of transient AGN/BLR conditions rather than systematic trends

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016 : dynamical modeling of velocity-resolved Hβ lags in luminous Seyfert galaxies

K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/R000824/1.We have modeled the velocity-resolved reverberation response of the Hβ broad emission line in nine Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Lick Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) Monitoring Project 2016 sample, drawing inferences on the geometry and structure of the low-ionization broad-line region (BLR) and the mass of the central supermassive black hole. Overall, we find that the Hβ BLR is generally a thick disk viewed at low to moderate inclination angles. We combine our sample with prior studies and investigate line-profile shape dependence, such as log10(FWHM/σ), on BLR structure and kinematics and search for any BLR luminosity-dependent trends. We find marginal evidence for an anticorrelation between the profile shape of the broad Hβ emission line and the Eddington ratio, when using the rms spectrum. However, we do not find any luminosity-dependent trends, and conclude that AGNs have diverse BLR structure and kinematics, consistent with the hypothesis of transient AGN/BLR conditions rather than systematic trends.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016 : velocity-resolved Hβ lags in luminous Seyfert galaxies

Funding: K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/R000824/1.We carried out spectroscopic monitoring of 21 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies using the Kast double spectrograph on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory from April 2016 to May 2017. Targetingactive galactic nuclei (AGN) with luminosities of λLλ(5100 Å) ≈ 1044 erg s−1 and predicted Hβ lags of∼ 20–30 days or black hole masses of 107–108.5 M⊙, our campaign probes luminosity-dependent trends in broad-line region (BLR) structure and dynamics as well as to improve calibrations for single-epoch estimates of quasar black hole masses. Here we present the first results from the campaign, including Hβ emission-line light curves, integrated Hβ lag times (8–30 days) measured against V -band continuum light curves, velocity-resolved reverberation lags, line widths of the broad Hβ components, and virial black hole mass estimates (107.1–108.1 M⊙). Our results add significantly to the number of existing velocity-resolved lag measurements and reveal a diversity of BLR gas kinematics at moderately high AGN luminosities. AGN continuum luminosity appears not to be correlated with the type of kinematics that its BLR gas may exhibit. Follow-up direct modeling of this dataset will elucidate the detailed kinematics and provide robust dynamical black hole masses for several objects in this sample.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The art of conviviality

This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience—that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place our own logics at risk. This picture of anthropological thought, moreover, demands that we reimagine the contours of the history of the field, remaining open to what might count as or for anthropology

JAVELIN analysis of reverberation mapping data from the Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2011

In 2011 Lick Observatory carried out a 2.5 month reverberation mapping campaign using the 3 meter Shane telescope monitoring 15 low redshift galaxies. The goal was to determine the black hole mass for each of these galaxies. My job was to use the JAVELIN software package to determine the size of the Broad Line Region around each of these objects and compare the results to those calculated using other methods. Here I present my findings for the 6 targets that JAVELIN found lag times for at least one of the emission lines. I also include the results using CCF which are in the process of being published

City of Letters: The Making of Literary Life in Berlin

Since the rise of the cultural bourgeoisie in the 19th century, German national imagination has been predicated on a picture of the life of the mind, an identity frequently expressed through the epithet ‘Land of Thinkers and Poets.’ In thousands of neighborhood bookshops, literary cafés and salons throughout the city, intimate and local networks intersect wider reading publics constituted between strangers. Today, Berlin has become a site where the political controversies over memories of the Holocaust are publicly engaged through art, and rapid transformations in the cultural landscape resulting from the fall of the Berlin Wall are still to be fully absorbed. More recently, the life of books has also become an important space in which the politics of difference in era of the Eurozone and migration crises is negotiated. The dissertation therefore tries to suggest some of the ways volatile processes that define urban life are refracted through artistic practices, and argues the regions of aesthetics, politics and ethics are neither reducible to one another, nor bound strictly apart in everyday life. My work explores how artistic and philosophical concepts like the sublime and the fantastic are embedded in everyday life, transforming possibilities for political and ethical action in contemporary Europe. Through my ethnography, I explore the daily labors of literary culture - among specialists and ordinary people, from reading and writing, to creating art and debating philosophy - at a time when questions around the aesthetics and politics of representation have remerged as central to confronting ethical tensions. To this end, I have been interested in the ways artistic forms of life allow city dwellers to remake the world around them, affording news way to confront catastrophic pasts, inhabit fragile presents, and imagine better futures. These forms of labor, I suggest, both engender and are produced by urban ecologies, offering a critical vantage on enduring structures of economic, racial, and expressive inequality. The literary, I argue, is not limited to the pages between the bindings of a book, but rather suffuses space, from the concrete and trees of city streets to the organization of social life. My fieldwork follows multiple and emergent forms of engagement across interlocking scenes in the city, and corresponding to the characters who move through these scenes, for example the salon director, the exile, the urban poet, the critic and the translator. In this way, I trace how the literary emerges through concrete practices that marry the durable structures of the law and the market to the effervescence of literary encounters

JAVELIN analysis of reverberation mapping data from the Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2011

In 2011 Lick Observatory carried out a 2.5 month reverberation mapping campaign using the 3 meter Shane telescope monitoring 15 low redshift galaxies. The goal was to determine the black hole mass for each of these galaxies. My job was to use the JAVELIN software package to determine the size of the Broad Line Region around each of these objects and compare the results to those calculated using other methods. Here I present my findings for the 6 targets that JAVELIN found lag times for at least one of the emission lines. I also include the results using CCF which are in the process of being published

For an Ordinary Aesthetics

International audienceThe impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics. More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary. Oftentimes, the ordinary continues “to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetition punctuated by the disruptions of the event.” Many similarly continue to think of ethics as principally concerned with rules and their infringement, as a domain constituted by judgements made some distance from the everyday. But this new body of work has powerfully questioned these assumptions. Veena Das explains that ordinary ethics by contrast examines “What is it that blocks our ability to see the everyday and hence to imagine the ethical as inhering in the quotidian rather than standing out and announcing its presence though dramatic enactments of moral breakdown or heroic achievement.” As these debates continue to develop, we began to see a further need for thinking about the possibility of ordinary aesthetics, a field which though intimately tied up with ethics, merits its own inquiry