Gravitational Lensing at Millimeter Wavelengths

With today's millimeter and submillimeter instruments observers use gravitational lensing mostly as a tool to boost the sensitivity when observing distant objects. This is evident through the dominance of gravitationally lensed objects among those detected in CO rotational lines at z>1. It is also evident in the use of lensing magnification by galaxy clusters in order to reach faint submm/mm continuum sources. There are, however, a few cases where millimeter lines have been directly involved in understanding lensing configurations. Future mm/submm instruments, such as the ALMA interferometer, will have both the sensitivity and the angular resolution to allow detailed observations of gravitational lenses. The almost constant sensitivity to dust emission over the redshift range z=1-10 means that the likelihood for strong lensing of dust continuum sources is much higher than for optically selected sources. A large number of new strong lenses are therefore likely to be discovered with ALMA, allowing a direct assessment of cosmological parameters through lens statistics. Combined with an angular resolution <0.1", ALMA will also be efficient for probing the gravitational potential of galaxy clusters, where we will be able to study both the sources and the lenses themselves, free of obscuration and extinction corrections, derive rotation curves for the lenses, their orientation and, thus, greatly constrain lens models.Comment: 69 pages, Review on quasar lensing. Part of a LNP Topical Volume on "Dark matter and gravitational lensing", eds. F. Courbin, D. Minniti. To be published by Springer-Verlag 2002. Paper with full resolution figures can be found at ftp://oden.oso.chalmers.se/pub/tommy/mmviews.ps.g

Research in Extracorporeal Life Support: A Call to Action

SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Tides in colliding galaxies

Long tails and streams of stars are the most noticeable upshots of galaxy collisions. Their origin as gravitational, tidal, disturbances has however been recognized only less than fifty years ago and more than ten years after their first observations. This Review describes how the idea of galactic tides emerged, in particular thanks to the advances in numerical simulations, from the first ones that included tens of particles to the most sophisticated ones with tens of millions of them and state-of-the-art hydrodynamical prescriptions. Theoretical aspects pertaining to the formation of tidal tails are then presented. The third part of the review turns to observations and underlines the need for collecting deep multi-wavelength data to tackle the variety of physical processes exhibited by collisional debris. Tidal tails are not just stellar structures, but turn out to contain all the components usually found in galactic disks, in particular atomic / molecular gas and dust. They host star-forming complexes and are able to form star-clusters or even second-generation dwarf galaxies. The final part of the review discusses what tidal tails can tell us (or not) about the structure and content of present-day galaxies, including their dark components, and explains how tidal tails may be used to probe the past evolution of galaxies and their mass assembly history. On-going deep wide-field surveys disclose many new low-surface brightness structures in the nearby Universe, offering great opportunities for attempting galactic archeology with tidal tails.Comment: 46 pages, 13 figures, Review to be published in "Tidal effects in Astronomy and Astrophysics", Lecture Notes in Physics. Comments are most welcom

Whole-genome sequencing reveals host factors underlying critical COVID-19

Critical COVID-19 is caused by immune-mediated inflammatory lung injury. Host genetic variation influences the development of illness requiring critical care1 or hospitalization2,3,4 after infection with SARS-CoV-2. The GenOMICC (Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care) study enables the comparison of genomes from individuals who are critically ill with those of population controls to find underlying disease mechanisms. Here we use whole-genome sequencing in 7,491 critically ill individuals compared with 48,400 controls to discover and replicate 23 independent variants that significantly predispose to critical COVID-19. We identify 16 new independent associations, including variants within genes that are involved in interferon signalling (IL10RB and PLSCR1), leucocyte differentiation (BCL11A) and blood-type antigen secretor status (FUT2). Using transcriptome-wide association and colocalization to infer the effect of gene expression on disease severity, we find evidence that implicates multiple genes—including reduced expression of a membrane flippase (ATP11A), and increased expression of a mucin (MUC1)—in critical disease. Mendelian randomization provides evidence in support of causal roles for myeloid cell adhesion molecules (SELE, ICAM5 and CD209) and the coagulation factor F8, all of which are potentially druggable targets. Our results are broadly consistent with a multi-component model of COVID-19 pathophysiology, in which at least two distinct mechanisms can predispose to life-threatening disease: failure to control viral replication; or an enhanced tendency towards pulmonary inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We show that comparison between cases of critical illness and population controls is highly efficient for the detection of therapeutically relevant mechanisms of disease

Cold gas dynamics in Hydra-A: evidence for a rotating disc

We present multifrequency observations of the radio galaxy Hydra-A (3C218) located in the core of a massive, X-ray luminous galaxy cluster. Integral field unit spectroscopy is used to trace the kinematics of the ionized and warm molecular hydrogen which are consistent with an ∼5 kpc rotating disc. Broad, double-peaked lines of CO(2–1), [C II] 157 μm and [O I] 63 μm are detected. We estimate the mass of the cold gas within the disc to be Mgas = 2.3 ± 0.3 × 109 M⊙. These observations demonstrate that the complex line profiles found in the cold atomic and molecular gas are related to the rotating disc or ring of gas. Finally, a Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy shows that this gas disc contains a substantial mass of dust. The large gas mass, star formation rate and kinematics are consistent with the levels of gas cooling from the intracluster medium (ICM). We conclude that the cold gas originates from the continual quiescent accumulation of cooled ICM gas. The rotation is in a plane perpendicular to the projected orientation of the radio jets and ICM cavities hinting at a possible connection between the kpc-scale cooling gas and the accretion of material on to the black hole. We discuss the implications of these observations for models of cold accretion, AGN feedback and cooling flows