10,992 research outputs found

    Bulge Globular Clusters in Spiral Galaxies

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    There is now strong evidence that the metal-rich globular clusters (GC) near the center of our Galaxy are associated with the Galactic bulge rather than the disk as previously thought. Here we extend the concept of bulge GCs to the GC systems of nearby spiral galaxies. In particular, the kinematic and metallicity properties of the GC systems favor a bulge rather than a disk origin. The number of metal-rich GCs normalized by the bulge luminosity is roughly constant (i.e. bulge S_N ~ 1) in nearby spirals, and this value is similar to that for field ellipticals when only the red (metal--rich) GCs are considered. We argue that the metallicity distributions of GCs in spiral and elliptical galaxies are remarkably similar, and that they obey the same correlation of mean GC metallicity with host galaxy mass. We further suggest that the metal-rich GCs in spirals are the direct analogs of the red GCs seen in ellipticals. The formation of a bulge/spheroidal stellar system is accompanied by the formation of metal-rich GCs. The similarities between GC systems in spiral and elliptical galaxies appear to be greater than the differences.Comment: 5 pages, Latex, 2 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

    The Southern Vilnius Photometric System. IV. The E Regions Standard Stars

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    This paper is the fourth in a series on the extension of the Vilnius photometric system to the southern hemisphere. Observations were made of 60 stars in the Harvard Standard E regions to increase a set of standard stars.Comment: 6 pages, TeX, requires 2 macros (baltic2.tex, baltic4.tex) included no figures, to be published in Baltic Astronomy, Vol 6, pp1-6 (1997

    Approximate Bayesian computation via the energy statistic

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    Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has become an essential part of the Bayesian toolbox for addressing problems in which the likelihood is prohibitively expensive or entirely unknown, making it intractable. ABC defines a pseudo-posterior by comparing observed data with simulated data, traditionally based on some summary statistics, the elicitation of which is regarded as a key difficulty. Recently, using data discrepancy measures has been proposed in order to bypass the construction of summary statistics. Here we propose to use the importance-sampling ABC (IS-ABC) algorithm relying on the so-called two-sample energy statistic. We establish a new asymptotic result for the case where both the observed sample size and the simulated data sample size increase to infinity, which highlights to what extent the data discrepancy measure impacts the asymptotic pseudo-posterior. The result holds in the broad setting of IS-ABC methodologies, thus generalizing previous results that have been established only for rejection ABC algorithms. Furthermore, we propose a consistent V-statistic estimator of the energy statistic, under which we show that the large sample result holds, and prove that the rejection ABC algorithm, based on the energy statistic, generates pseudo-posterior distributions that achieves convergence to the correct limits, when implemented with rejection thresholds that converge to zero, in the finite sample setting. Our proposed energy statistic based ABC algorithm is demonstrated on a variety of models, including a Gaussian mixture, a moving-average model of order two, a bivariate beta and a multivariate gg-and-kk distribution. We find that our proposed method compares well with alternative discrepancy measures.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 5 table
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