1,954 research outputs found
Immunogenicity and safety of three consecutive production lots of the non replicating smallpox vaccine MVA: A randomised, double blind, placebo controlled phase III trial
<div><p>Background</p><p>Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) is a live, viral vaccine under advanced development as a non-replicating smallpox vaccine. A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III clinical trial was conducted to demonstrate the humoral immunogenic equivalence of three consecutively manufactured MVA production lots, and to confirm the safety and tolerability of MVA focusing on cardiac readouts.</p><p>Methods</p><p>The trial was conducted at 34 sites in the US. Vaccinia-naïve adults aged 18-40 years were randomly allocated to one of four groups using a 1:1:1:1 randomization scheme. Subjects received either two MVA injections from three consecutive lots (Groups 1-3), or two placebo injections (Group 4), four weeks apart. Everyone except personnel involved in vaccine handling and administration was blinded to treatment. Safety assessment focused on cardiac monitoring throughout the trial. Vaccinia-specific antibody titers were measured using a Plaque Reduction Neutralization Test (PRNT) and an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA). The primary immunogenicity endpoint was Geometric Mean Titers (GMTs) after two MVA vaccinations measured by PRNT at trial visit 4. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT01144637.</p><p>Results</p><p>Between March 2013 and May 2014, 4005 subjects were enrolled and received at least one injection of MVA (n = 3003) or placebo (n = 1002). The three MVA lots induced equivalent antibody titers two weeks after the second vaccination, with seroconversion rates of 99·8% (PRNT) and 99·7% (ELISA). Overall, 180 (6·0%) subjects receiving MVA and 29 (2·9%) subjects in the placebo group reported at least one unsolicited Adverse Event (AE) that was considered trial-related. Vaccination was well tolerated without significant safety concerns, particularly regarding cardiac assessment.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>The neutralizing and total antibody titers induced by each of the three lots were equivalent. No significant safety concerns emerged in this healthy trial population, especially regarding cardiac safety, thus confirming the excellent safety and tolerability profile of MVA.</p><p>Trial registration</p><p>ClinicalTrials.gov <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01144637" target="_blank">NCT01144637</a></p></div
Gravitational Lensing Signature of Long Cosmic Strings
The gravitational lensing by long, wiggly cosmic strings is shown to produce
a large number of lensed images of a background source. In addition to pairs of
images on either side of the string, a number of small images outline the
string due to small-scale structure on the string. This image pattern could
provide a highly distinctive signature of cosmic strings. Since the optical
depth for multiple imaging of distant quasar sources by long strings may be
comparable to that by galaxies, these image patterns should be clearly
observable in the next generation of redshift surveys such as the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey.Comment: 4 pages, revtex with 3 postscript figures include
Millimeter and sub-millimeter atmospheric performance at Dome C combining radiosoundings and ATM synthetic spectra
The reliability of astronomical observations at millimeter and sub-millimeter
wavelengths closely depends on a low vertical content of water vapor as well as
on high atmospheric emission stability. Although Concordia station at Dome C
(Antarctica) enjoys good observing conditions in this atmospheric spectral
windows, as shown by preliminary site-testing campaigns at different bands and
in, not always, time overlapped periods, a dedicated instrument able to
continuously determine atmospheric performance for a wide spectral range is not
yet planned. In the absence of such measurements, in this paper we suggest a
semi-empirical approach to perform an analysis of atmospheric transmission and
emission at Dome C to compare the performance for 7 photometric bands ranging
from 100 GHz to 2 THz. Radiosoundings data provided by the Routine
Meteorological Observations (RMO) Research Project at Concordia station are
corrected by temperature and humidity errors and dry biases and then employed
to feed ATM (Atmospheric Transmission at Microwaves) code to generate synthetic
spectra in the wide spectral range from 100 GHz to 2 THz. To quantify the
atmospheric contribution in millimeter and sub-millimeter observations we are
considering several photometric bands in which atmospheric quantities are
integrated. The observational capabilities of this site at all the selected
spectral bands are analyzed considering monthly averaged transmissions joined
to the corresponding fluctuations. Transmission and pwv statistics at Dome C
derived by our semi-empirical approach are consistent with previous works. It
is evident the decreasing of the performance at high frequencies. We propose to
introduce a new parameter to compare the quality of a site at different
spectral bands, in terms of high transmission and emission stability, the Site
Photometric Quality Factor.Comment: accepted to MNRAS with minor revision
The statistics of wide-separation lensed quasars
The absence of any wide-separation gravitational lenses in the Large Bright
Quasar Survey is used to place limits on the population of cluster-sized halos
in the universe, and hence constrain a number of cosmological parameters. The
results agree with previous investigations in strongly ruling out the standard
cold dark matter model but they are consistent with low-density universes in
which the primordial fluctuation spectrum matches both cluster abundances and
cosmic microwave background measurements. These conclusions are essentially
independent of the cosmological constant, which is in stark contrast to the
statistics of galaxy lenses. The constraints presented here are nullified if
clusters have core radii of more than 10 kpc, but are free of a number of
potential systematic errors, due to the homogeneity of the data.Comment: MNRAS, in press; 7 pages, 8 figure
A reflection origin for the soft and hard X-ray excess of Ark 120
Over the last few years several models have been proposed to interpret the
widespread soft excess observed in the X-ray spectra of type 1 active galactic
nuclei (AGN). In particular, reflection from the photoionized accretion disc
blurred by relativistic effects has proven to be successful in reproducing both
the spectral shape and the variability pattern of many sources. As a further
test to this scenario we present the analysis of a recent ~100 ks long Suzaku
observation of Arakelian 120, a prototypical 'bare' Seyfert 1 galaxy in which
no complex absorption system is expected to mimic a soft excess or mask the
intrinsic properties of this key component. We show that a reflection model
allowing for both warm/blurred and cold/distant reprocessing provides a
self-consistent and convincing interpretation of the broadband X-ray emission
of Ark 120, also characterized by a structured iron feature and a high-energy
hump. Although warm absorbers, winds/outflows and multiple Comptonizing regions
may play significant roles in sources with more spectral complexity, this case
study adds evidence to the presence of blurred disc reflection as a basic
component of the X-ray spectra of type 1 AGN.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Isotropic Luminosity Indicators in a Complete AGN Sample
The [O IV] 25.89 micron line has been shown to be an accurate indicator of
active galactic nucleus (AGN) intrinsic luminosity in that it correlates well
with hard (10-200 keV) X-ray emission. We present measurements of [O IV] for 89
Seyfert galaxies from the unbiased Revised Shapley-Ames (RSA) sample. The [O
IV] luminosity distributions of obscured and unobscured Seyferts are
indistinguishable, indicating that their intrinsic AGN luminosities are quite
similar and that the RSA sample is well suited for tests of the unified model.
In addition, we analyze several commonly used proxies for AGN luminosity,
including [O III] 5007 A, 6 cm radio, and 2-10 keV X-ray emission. We find that
the radio luminosity distributions of obscured and unobscured AGNs show no
significant difference, indicating that radio luminosity is a useful isotropic
luminosity indicator. However, the observed [O III] and 2-10 keV luminosities
are systematically smaller for obscured Seyferts, indicating that they are not
emitted isotropically.Comment: Updated to match version published in ApJ. 9 pages, 4 figure
The Spectral Energy Distribution and Emission-Line properties of the NLS1 Galaxy Arakelian 564
We present the intrinsic spectral energy distribution (SED) of the NLS1
Arakelian 564, constructed with contemporaneous data obtained during a
multi-wavelength, multi-satellite observing campaign in 2000 and 2001. We
compare it with that of the NLS1 Ton S180 and with those obtained for BLS1s to
infer how the relative accretion rates vary among the Sy1 population. Although
the peak of the SED is not well constrained, most of the energy is emitted in
the 10-100 eV regime, constituting roughly half of the emitted energy in the
optical/X-ray ranges. This is consistent with a primary spectral component
peaking in the extreme UV/soft X-ray band, and disk-corona models, hence high
accretion rates. Indeed, we estimate that \dot{m}~1. We examine the emission
lines in its spectrum, and we constrain the physical properties of the
line-emitting gas through photoionization modeling. The line-emitting gas is
characterized by log n~11 and log U~0, and is stratified around log U~0. Our
estimate of the radius of the H\beta-emitting region ~10 \pm 2 lt-days is
consistent with the radius-luminosity relationships found for Sy1 galaxies. We
also find evidence for super-solar metallicity in this NLS1. We show that the
emission lines are not good diagnostics for the underlying SEDs and that the
absorption line studies offer a far more powerful tool to determine the
ionizing continuum of AGNs, especially if comparing the lower- and
higher-ionization lines.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journal, LaTeX emulateapj.st
Optical Identification of the ASCA Large Sky Survey
We present results of optical identification of the X-ray sources detected in
the ASCA Large Sky Survey. Optical spectroscopic observations were done for 34
X-ray sources which were detected with the SIS in the 2-7 keV band above 3.5
sigma. The sources are identified with 30 AGNs, 2 clusters of galaxies, and 1
galactic star. Only 1 source is still unidentified. The flux limit of the
sample corresponds to 1 x 10^{-13} erg s^{-1} cm^{-2} in the 2-10 keV band.
Based on the sample, the paper discusses optical and X-ray spectral
properties of the AGNs, contribution of the sources to the Cosmic X-ray
Background, and redshift and luminosity distributions of the AGNs. An
interesting result is that the redshift distribution of the AGNs suggests a
deficiency of high-redshift (0.5 10^{44}
erg s^{-1}) absorbed narrow-line AGNs (so called type 2 QSOs).Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. 57 pages with 13 figures, 9 JPG
plates, 5 additional PS tables. Original EPS plates (gzipped format
~1Mbyte/plate) and TeX tables are available from
ftp://ftp.kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp/pub/akiyama/0001289
Hard X-ray Variability of AGN
Aims: Active Galactic Nuclei are known to be variable throughout the
electromagnetic spectrum. An energy domain poorly studied in this respect is
the hard X-ray range above 20 keV.
Methods: The first 9 months of the Swift/BAT all-sky survey are used to study
the 14 - 195 keV variability of the 44 brightest AGN. The sources have been
selected due to their detection significance of >10 sigma. We tested the
variability using a maximum likelihood estimator and by analysing the structure
function.
Results: Probing different time scales, it appears that the absorbed AGN are
more variable than the unabsorbed ones. The same applies for the comparison of
Seyfert 2 and Seyfert 1 objects. As expected the blazars show stronger
variability. 15% of the non-blazar AGN show variability of >20% compared to the
average flux on time scales of 20 days, and 30% show at least 10% flux
variation. All the non-blazar AGN which show strong variability are
low-luminosity objects with L(14-195 keV) < 1E44 erg/sec.
Conclusions: Concerning the variability pattern, there is a tendency of
unabsorbed or type 1 galaxies being less variable than the absorbed or type 2
objects at hardest X-rays. A more solid anti-correlation is found between
variability and luminosity, which has been previously observed in soft X-rays,
in the UV, and in the optical domain.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in A&
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