10,101 research outputs found
Rapid Spindown of SGR 1900+14 Following Its Superburst
SGR 1900+14 had a brief episode of exceedingly rapid spindown immediately
following its 1998 Aug. 27 superburst. On a timescale of hours, it increased
its period by a part in 10^4. The corresponding Pdot ~ 10^{-8} is orders of
magnitude higher than the typical quiescent rate of Pdot ~ 6x10^{-11}.Comment: Submitted to Mem.S.A.It. for inclusion in the proceedings of 'Soft
Gamma Repeaters: The Rome 2001 Mini-Workshop'. (6 pages, requires
memsait.sty, included
Supervision of large complex banking organizations
The long-term trends of consolidation and innovation in the U.S. banking system have intensified over the past decade. A small number of banking organizations now hold a larger portion of the banking system's assets, and, at the same time, their activities have become more complex. As a result, the Federal Reserve has altered its approach to the supervision of the largest, most complex banking organizations (LCBOs). This new approach focuses on the most important risks facing U.S. banking organizations and the ways in which these risks are managed. This article discusses the Federal Reserve's risk-focused supervision program as applied to LCBOs.Bank supervision ; Bank holding companies
A Fast Chi-squared Technique For Period Search of Irregularly Sampled Data
A new, computationally- and statistically-efficient algorithm, the Fast
algorithm, can find a periodic signal with harmonic content in
irregularly-sampled data with non-uniform errors. The algorithm calculates the
minimized as a function of frequency at the desired number of
harmonics, using Fast Fourier Transforms to provide performance.
The code for a reference implementation is provided.Comment: Source code for the reference implementation is available at
http://public.lanl.gov/palmer/fastchi.html . Accepted by ApJ. 24 pages, 4
figure
Afterglows of Gamma-Ray Bursts: Short vs. Long GRBs
We compiled a large sample of Swift-era photometric data on long (Type II)
and short (Type I) GRB afterglows. We compare the luminosity and energetics of
the different samples to each other and to the afterglows of the pre-Swift era.
Here, we present the first results of these studies.Comment: Conference Proceedings, "Gamma-Ray Bursts 2007", Santa Fe, shortened
poster presentation; 4 pages, 3 figures; for full updated papers, go here to
arXiv:0712.2186 and also here to arXiv:0804.195
Strong spectral evolution during the prompt emission of GRB 070616
Swift has revealed features in GRB early light curves, such as steep decays
and X-ray flares, whose properties are consistent with an internal origin
though they are far from understood. The steep X-ray decay is often explained
using the curvature effect; however a significant number of GRBs display strong
spectral evolution during this phase, and a new mechanism must be invoked to
explain this. Of particular interest are the longest duration GRBs in which the
early emission can be studied in most detail. Here we present data for GRB
070616, in which the prompt emission shows a complex multipeaked structure,
leading to one of the longest prompt emission durations ever recorded. We take
advantage of extensive coverage of such a long burst by all Swift instruments.
Combining data from Swift and Suzaku we study the evolution of the prompt
emission spectrum, following the temporal variability of the peak energy and
spectral slope.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures (Fig 1 in colour), contributed talk, submitted to
the proceedings of Gamma Ray Bursts 2007, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 5-9
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The ECLAIRs telescope onboard the SVOM mission for gamma-ray burst studies
The X- and gamma-ray telescope ECLAIRs onboard the future mission for
gamma-ray burst studies SVOM (Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable
Objects Monitor) is foreseen to operate in orbit from 2013 on. ECLAIRs will
provide fast and accurate GRB triggers to other onboard telescopes, as well as
to the whole GRB community, in particular ground-based follow-up telescopes.
With its very low energy threshold ECLAIRs is particularly well suited for the
detection of highly redshifted GRB. The ECLAIRs X- and gamma-ray imaging camera
(CXG), used for GRB detection and localization, is combined with a soft X-ray
telescope (SXT) for afterglow observations and position refinement. The CXG is
a 2D-coded mask imager with a 1024 cm detection plane made of 8080
CdTe pixels, sensitive from 4 to 300 keV, with imaging capabilities up to about
120 keV and a localization accuracy better than 10 arcmin. The CXG permanently
observes a 2 sr-wide field of the sky and provides photon data to the onboard
science and triggering unit (UTS) which detects GRB by count-rate increases or
by the appearance of a new source in cyclic sky images. The SXT is a mirror
focusing X-ray telescope operating from 0.3 to 2 keV with a sensitivity of 1
mCrab for 100 s observations. The spacecraft slews within 3 min in
order to place the GRB candidate into the 2323 arcmin field of view
of the SXT, after which it refines the GRB position to about 10 arcsec. GRB
alerts are transmitted to ground-observers within tens of seconds via a VHF
network and all detected photons are available hours later for detailed
analysis. In this paper we present the ECLAIRs concepts, with emphasis on the
expected performances.Comment: on behalf of the ECLAIRs collaboration. Proceedings of Gamma-Ray
Bursts 2007 conference, Santa Fe, USA, 5-9 November 2007. Published in AIP
conf. proc. 1000, 581-584 (2008
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