3,569 research outputs found
Fluctuating survival selection explains variation in avian group size
Most animal groups vary extensively in size. Because individuals in certain sizes of groups often have higher apparent fitness than those in other groups, why wide group size variation persists in most populations remains unexplained. We used a 30-y mark– recapture study of colonially breeding cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) to show that the survival advantages of different colony sizes fluctuated among years. Colony size was under both stabilizing and directional selection in different years, and reversals in the sign of directional selection regularly occurred. Directional selection was predicted in part by drought conditions: birds in larger colonies tended to be favored in cooler and wetter years, and birds in smaller colonies in hotter and drier years. Oscillating selection on colony size likely reflected annual differences in food availability and the consequent importance of information transfer, and/or the level of ectoparasitism, with the net benefit of sociality varying under these different conditions. Averaged across years, there was no net directional change in selection on colony size. The wide range in cliff swallow group size is probably maintained by fluctuating survival selection and represents the first case, to our knowledge, in which fitness advantages of different group sizes regularly oscillate over time in a natural vertebrate population
Fluctuating survival selection explains variation in avian group size
Most animal groups vary extensively in size. Because individuals in certain sizes of groups often have higher apparent fitness than those in other groups, why wide group size variation persists in most populations remains unexplained. We used a 30-y mark– recapture study of colonially breeding cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) to show that the survival advantages of different colony sizes fluctuated among years. Colony size was under both stabilizing and directional selection in different years, and reversals in the sign of directional selection regularly occurred. Directional selection was predicted in part by drought conditions: birds in larger colonies tended to be favored in cooler and wetter years, and birds in smaller colonies in hotter and drier years. Oscillating selection on colony size likely reflected annual differences in food availability and the consequent importance of information transfer, and/or the level of ectoparasitism, with the net benefit of sociality varying under these different conditions. Averaged across years, there was no net directional change in selection on colony size. The wide range in cliff swallow group size is probably maintained by fluctuating survival selection and represents the first case, to our knowledge, in which fitness advantages of different group sizes regularly oscillate over time in a natural vertebrate population
Complex Instantons and Charged Rotating Black Hole Pair Creation
We consider the general process of pair-creation of charged rotating black
holes. We find that instantons which describe this process are necessarily
complex due to regularity requirements. However their associated probabilities
are real, and fully consistent with the interpretation that the entropy of a
charged rotating black hole is the logarithm of the number of its quantum
states.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, Latex, text shortened with only minor changes in
content, accepted for Phys Rev Letter
Consistent accretion-induced heating of the neutron-star crust in MXB 1659-29 during two different outbursts
Monitoring the cooling of neutron-star crusts heated during accretion
outbursts allows us to infer the physics of the dense matter present in the
crust. We examine the crust cooling evolution of the low-mass X-ray binary MXB
1659-29 up to ~505 days after the end of its 2015 outburst (hereafter outburst
II) and compare it with what we observed after its previous 1999 outburst
(hereafter outburst I) using data obtained from the Swift, XMM-Newton, and
Chandra observatories. The observed effective surface temperature of the
neutron star in MXB 1659-29 dropped from ~92 eV to ~56 eV from ~12 days to ~505
days after the end of outburst II. The most recently performed observation
after outburst II suggests that the crust is close to returning to thermal
equilibrium with the core. We model the crust heating and cooling for both its
outbursts collectively to understand the effect of parameters that may change
for every outburst (e.g., the average accretion rate, the length of outburst,
the envelope composition of the neutron star at the end of the outburst) and
those which can be assumed to remain the same during these two outbursts (e.g.,
the neutron star mass, its radius). Our modelling indicates that all parameters
were consistent between the two outbursts with no need for any significant
changes. In particular, the strength and the depth of the shallow heating
mechanism at work (in the crust) were inferred to be the same during both
outbursts, contrary to what has been found when modelling the cooling curves
after multiple outburst of another source, MAXI J0556-332. This difference in
source behaviour is not understood. We discuss our results in the context of
our current understanding of cooling of accretion-heated neutron-star crusts,
and in particular with respect to the unexplained shallow heating mechanism.Comment: Submitted to A&A. The supplementary video can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpJ053zq9-
Positivity of Entropy in the Semi-Classical Theory of Black Holes and Radiation
Quantum stress-energy tensors of fields renormalized on a Schwarzschild
background violate the classical energy conditions near the black hole.
Nevertheless, the associated equilibrium thermodynamical entropy by
which such fields augment the usual black hole entropy is found to be positive.
More precisely, the derivative of with respect to radius, at fixed
black hole mass, is found to vanish at the horizon for {\it all} regular
renormalized stress-energy quantum tensors. For the cases of conformal scalar
fields and U(1) gauge fields, the corresponding second derivative is positive,
indicating that has a local minimum there. Explicit calculation
shows that indeed increases monotonically for increasing radius and
is positive. (The same conclusions hold for a massless spin 1/2 field, but the
accuracy of the stress-energy tensor we employ has not been confirmed, in
contrast to the scalar and vector cases). None of these results would hold if
the back-reaction of the radiation on the spacetime geometry were ignored;
consequently, one must regard as arising from both the radiation
fields and their effects on the gravitational field. The back-reaction, no
matter how "small",Comment: 19 pages, RevTe
Crowdsourcing Linked Data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data
Research has approached the practice of musical reception in a multitude of ways, such as the analysis of professional critique, sales figures and psychological processes activated by the act of listening. Studies in the Humanities, on the other hand, have been hindered by the lack of structured evidence of actual experiences of listening as reported by the listeners themselves, a concern that was voiced since the early Web era. It was however assumed that such evidence existed, albeit in pure textual form, but could not be leveraged until it was digitised and aggregated. The Listening Experience Database (LED) responds to this research need by providing a centralised hub for evidence of listening in the literature. Not only does LED support search and reuse across nearly 10,000 records, but it also provides machine-readable structured data of the knowledge around the contexts of listening. To take advantage of the mass of formal knowledge that already exists on the Web concerning these contexts, the entire framework adopts Linked Data principles and technologies. This also allows LED to directly reuse open data from the British Library for the source documentation that is already published. Reused data are re-published as open data with enhancements obtained by expanding over the model of the original data, such as the partitioning of published books and collections into individual stand-alone documents. The database was populated through crowdsourcing and seamlessly incorporates data reuse from the very early data entry phases. As the sources of the evidence often contain vague, fragmentary of uncertain information, facilities were put in place to generate structured data out of such fuzziness. Alongside elaborating on these functionalities, this article provides insights into the most recent features of the latest instalment of the dataset and portal, such as the interlinking with the MusicBrainz database, the relaxation of geographical input constraints through text mining, and the plotting of key locations in an interactive geographical browser
Structure in the Rotation Measure Sky
An analysis of structure in rotation measure (RM) across the sky based on the
RM catalog of Taylor et al. (2009) is presented. Several resolved RM structures
are identified with structure in the local ISM, including radio loops I, II,
and III, the Gum nebula, and the Orion-Eridanus super bubble. Structure
functions (SFs) of RM are presented for selected areas, and maps of SF
amplitude and slope across the sky are compared with H-alpha intensity and
diffuse polarized intensity. RM variance on an angular scale of 1 degree is
correlated with length of the line of sight through the Galaxy, with a
contribution from local structures. The slope of the SFs is less concentrated
to the Galactic plane and less correlated with length of the line of sight
through the Galaxy, suggesting a more local origin for RM structure on angular
scales ~ 10 degrees. The RM variance is a factor ~2 higher towards the SGP than
towards the NGP, reflecting a more wide-spread asymmetry between the northern
and southern Galactic hemispheres. Depolarization of diffuse Galactic
synchrotron emission at latitudes < 30 degrees can be explained largely by
Faraday dispersion related to small-scale variance in RM, but the errors allow
a significant contribution from differential Faraday rotation along the line of
sight.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures. Figures 1-4 and 9-10 available as separate
files. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal A complete pdf
with all figures included is available at
http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~stil/Stil_2010_RM_structure.pd
Semiclassical charged black holes with a quantized massive scalar field
Semiclassical perturbations to the Reissner-Nordstrom metric caused by the
presence of a quantized massive scalar field with arbitrary curvature coupling
are found to first order in \epsilon = \hbar/M^2. The DeWitt-Schwinger
approximation is used to determine the vacuum stress-energy tensor of the
massive scalar field. When the semiclassical perturbation are taken into
account, we find extreme black holes will have a charge-to-mass ratio that
exceeds unity, as measured at infinity. The effects of the perturbations on the
black hole temperature (surface gravity) are studied in detail, with particular
emphasis on near extreme ``bare'' states that might become precisely zero
temperature ``dressed'' semiclassical black hole states. We find that for
minimally or conformally coupled scalar fields there are no zero temperature
solutions among the perturbed black holes.Comment: 19 pages; 1 figure; ReVTe
Seven-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Sky Maps, Systematic Errors, and Basic Results
(Abridged) New full sky temperature and polarization maps based on seven
years of data from WMAP are presented. The new results are consistent with
previous results, but have improved due to reduced noise from the additional
integration time, improved knowledge of the instrument performance, and
improved data analysis procedures. The improvements are described in detail.
The seven year data set is well fit by a minimal six-parameter flat Lambda-CDM
model. The parameters for this model, using the WMAP data in conjunction with
baryon acoustic oscillation data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and priors
on H_0 from Hubble Space Telescope observations, are: Omega_bh^2 = 0.02260
+-0.00053, Omega_ch^2 = 0.1123 +-0.0035, Omega_Lambda = 0.728 +0.015 -0.016,
n_s = 0.963 +-0.012, tau = 0.087 +-0.014 and sigma_8 = 0.809 +-0.024 (68 % CL
uncertainties). The temperature power spectrum signal-to-noise ratio per
multipole is greater that unity for multipoles < 919, allowing a robust
measurement of the third acoustic peak. This measurement results in improved
constraints on the matter density, Omega_mh^2 = 0.1334 +0.0056 -0.0055, and the
epoch of matter- radiation equality, z_eq = 3196 +134 -133, using WMAP data
alone. The new WMAP data, when combined with smaller angular scale microwave
background anisotropy data, results in a 3 sigma detection of the abundance of
primordial Helium, Y_He = 0.326 +-0.075.The power-law index of the primordial
power spectrum is now determined to be n_s = 0.963 +-0.012, excluding the
Harrison-Zel'dovich-Peebles spectrum by >3 sigma. These new WMAP measurements
provide important tests of Big Bang cosmology.Comment: 42 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to Astrophysical Journal Supplement
Serie
Instrumental and Analytic Methods for Bolometric Polarimetry
We discuss instrumental and analytic methods that have been developed for the
first generation of bolometric cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeters.
The design, characterization, and analysis of data obtained using Polarization
Sensitive Bolometers (PSBs) are described in detail. This is followed by a
brief study of the effect of various polarization modulation techniques on the
recovery of sky polarization from scanning polarimeter data. Having been
successfully implemented on the sub-orbital Boomerang experiment, PSBs are
currently operational in two terrestrial CMB polarization experiments (QUaD and
the Robinson Telescope). We investigate two approaches to the analysis of data
from these experiments, using realistic simulations of time ordered data to
illustrate the impact of instrumental effects on the fidelity of the recovered
polarization signal. We find that the analysis of difference time streams takes
full advantage of the high degree of common mode rejection afforded by the PSB
design. In addition to the observational efforts currently underway, this
discussion is directly applicable to the PSBs that constitute the polarized
capability of the Planck HFI instrument.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures. for submission to A&
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