1,052 research outputs found
Near-bed hydrodynamics and turbulence below a large-scale plunging breaking wave over a mobile barred bed profile
Funded by The research presented in this paper is part of the SINBAD project. Grant Number: STW (12058) and EPSRC (EP/J00507X/1, EP/J005541/1)Peer reviewedPublisher PDFPublisher PD
The first application of full scale Posidonia seagrass mimics to investigate wave flow and energy dissipation
Observational constraints to boxy/peanut bulge formation time
Boxy/peanut bulges are considered to be part of the same stellar structure as
bars and both could be linked through the buckling instability. The Milky Way
is our closest example. The goal of this letter is determining if the mass
assembly of the different components leaves an imprint in their stellar
populations allowing to estimate the time of bar formation and its evolution.
To this aim we use integral field spectroscopy to derive the stellar age
distributions, SADs, along the bar and disc of NGC 6032. The analysis shows
clearly different SADs for the different bar areas. There is an underlying old
(>=12 Gyr) stellar population for the whole galaxy. The bulge shows star
formation happening at all times. The inner bar structure shows stars of ages
older than 6 Gyrs with a deficit of younger populations. The outer bar region
presents a SAD similar to that of the disc. To interpret our results, we use a
generic numerical simulation of a barred galaxy. Thus, we constrain, for the
first time, the epoch of bar formation, the buckling instability period and the
posterior growth from disc material. We establish that the bar of NGC 6032 is
old, formed around 10 Gyr ago while the buckling phase possibly happened around
8 Gyr ago. All these results point towards bars being long-lasting even in the
presence of gas.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter
Hydrodynamics from the Dp-brane
We complete the computation of viscous transport coefficients in the near
horizon geometries that arise from a stack of black Dp-branes for p=2,...,6 in
the decoupling limit. The main new result is the obtention of the bulk
viscosity which, for all p, is found to be related to the speed of sound by the
simple relation \zeta/\eta = -2(v_s^2-1/p). For completeness the shear
viscosity is rederived from gravitational perturbations in the shear and scalar
channels. We comment on technical issues like the counterterms needed, or the
possible dependence on the conformal frame.Comment: 15 page
Spinning Dragging Strings
We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to compute the drag force experienced by a
heavy quark moving through a maximally supersymmetric SU(N) super Yang-Mills
plasma at nonzero temperature and R-charge chemical potential and at large 't
Hooft coupling. We resolve a discrepancy in the literature between two earlier
studies of such quarks. In addition, we consider small fluctuations of the
spinning strings dual to these probe quarks and find no evidence of
instabilities. We make some comments about suitable D7-brane boundary
conditions for the dual strings.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures; v2 refs added; v3 to appear in JHEP, clarifying
comment
Resolving the age bimodality of galaxy stellar populations on kpc scales
Galaxies in the local Universe are known to follow bimodal distributions in
the global stellar populations properties. We analyze the distribution of the
local average stellar-population ages of 654,053 sub-galactic regions resolved
on ~1-kpc scales in a volume-corrected sample of 394 galaxies, drawn from the
CALIFA-DR3 integral-field-spectroscopy survey and complemented by SDSS imaging.
We find a bimodal local-age distribution, with an old and a young peak
primarily due to regions in early-type galaxies and star-forming regions of
spirals, respectively. Within spiral galaxies, the older ages of bulges and
inter-arm regions relative to spiral arms support an internal age bimodality.
Although regions of higher stellar-mass surface-density, mu*, are typically
older, mu* alone does not determine the stellar population age and a bimodal
distribution is found at any fixed mu*. We identify an "old ridge" of regions
of age ~9 Gyr, independent of mu*, and a "young sequence" of regions with age
increasing with mu* from 1-1.5 Gyr to 4-5 Gyr. We interpret the former as
regions containing only old stars, and the latter as regions where the relative
contamination of old stellar populations by young stars decreases as mu*
increases. The reason why this bimodal age distribution is not inconsistent
with the unimodal shape of the cosmic-averaged star-formation history is that
i) the dominating contribution by young stars biases the age low with respect
to the average epoch of star formation, and ii) the use of a single average age
per region is unable to represent the full time-extent of the star-formation
history of "young-sequence" regions.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS accepte
DZ Cha: a bona fide photoevaporating disc
DZ Cha is a weak-lined T Tauri star (WTTS) surrounded by a bright
protoplanetary disc with evidence of inner disc clearing. Its narrow \Ha line
and infrared spectral energy distribution suggest that DZ Cha may be a
photoevaporating disc. We aim to analyse the DZ Cha star + disc system to
identify the mechanism driving the evolution of this object. We have analysed
three epochs of high resolution optical spectroscopy, photometry from the UV up
to the sub-mm regime, infrared spectroscopy, and J-band imaging polarimetry
observations of DZ Cha. Combining our analysis with previous studies we find no
signatures of accretion in the \Ha line profile in nine epochs covering a
time baseline of years. The optical spectra are dominated by
chromospheric emission lines, but they also show emission from the forbidden
lines [SII] 4068 and [OI] 6300 that indicate a disc outflow. The
polarized images reveal a dust depleted cavity of au in radius and two
spiral-like features, and we derive a disc dust mass limit of
M_\mathrm{dust}
80 \MJup) companions are detected down to 0\farcs07 ( au,
projected). The negligible accretion rate, small cavity, and forbidden line
emission strongly suggests that DZ Cha is currently at the initial stages of
disc clearing by photoevaporation. At this point the inner disc has drained and
the inner wall of the truncated outer disc is directly exposed to the stellar
radiation. We argue that other mechanisms like planet formation or binarity
cannot explain the observed properties of DZ Cha. The scarcity of objects like
this one is in line with the dispersal timescale ( yr) predicted
by this theory. DZ Cha is therefore an ideal target to study the initial stages
of photoevaporation.Comment: A&A in press, language corrections include
Deep inelastic scattering off a N=4 SYM plasma at strong coupling
By using the AdS/CFT correspondence we study the deep inelastic scattering of
an R-current off a N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) plasma at finite
temperature and strong coupling. Within the supergravity approximation valid
when the number of colors is large, we compute the structure functions by
solving Maxwell equations in the space-time geometry of the AdS_5 black
three-brane. We find a rather sharp transition between a low energy regime
where the scattering is weak and quasi-elastic, and a high-energy regime where
the current is completely absorbed. The critical energy for this transition
determines the plasma saturation momentum in terms of its temperature T and the
Bjorken x variable: Q_s=T/x. These results suggest a partonic picture for the
plasma where all the partons have transverse momenta below the saturation
momentum and occupation numbers of order one.Comment: Version accepted for publication in JHEP: more references added; some
technical points were displaced from Sect. 4 to the new Appendix
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