6,357 research outputs found
A new technique for monitoring the water vapor in the atmosphere
In the correction of satellite Doppler data for tropospheric effects the precipitable water vapor (PWV) is inferred at the tracking site. The technique depends on: (1) an ephemeris for the satellite; (2) an analytic model for the refraction range effect that is good to a few centimeters; (3) Doppler data with noise level below 10 centimeters; and (4) a surface pressure/temperature measurement at the tracking site. The PWV is a by product of the computation necessary to correct the Doppler data for tropospheric effects. A formulation of the refraction integral minimizes the necessity for explicit water vapor, temperature and pressure profiles
WL 17: A Young Embedded Transition Disk
We present the highest spatial resolution ALMA observations to date of the
Class I protostar WL 17 in the Ophiuchus L1688 molecular cloud complex,
which show that it has a 12 AU hole in the center of its disk. We consider
whether WL 17 is actually a Class II disk being extincted by foreground
material, but find that such models do not provide a good fit to the broadband
SED and also require such high extinction that it would presumably arise from
dense material close to the source such as a remnant envelope. Self-consistent
models of a disk embedded in a rotating collapsing envelope can nicely
reproduce both the ALMA 3 mm observations and the broadband SED of WL 17. This
suggests that WL 17 is a disk in the early stages of its formation, and yet
even at this young age the inner disk has been depleted. Although there are
multiple pathways for such a hole to be created in a disk, if this hole were
produced by the formation of planets it could place constraints on the
timescale for the growth of planetesimals in protoplanetary disks.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ
Protoplanetary Disks in the Orion Nebula Cluster: Gas Disk Morphologies and Kinematics as seen with ALMA
We present Atacama Large Millimeter Array CO(32) and HCO(43)
observations covering the central region of
the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). The unprecedented level of sensitivity
(0.1 mJy beam) and angular resolution ( AU) of these line observations enable us to search for gas-disk
detections towards the known positions of submillimeter-detected dust disks in
this region. We detect 23 disks in gas: 17 in CO(32), 17 in HCO(43),
and 11 in both lines. Depending on where the sources are located in the ONC, we
see the line detections in emission, in absorption against the warm background,
or in both emission and absorption. We spectrally resolve the gas with km
s channels, and find that the kinematics of most sources are consistent
with Keplerian rotation. We measure the distribution of gas-disk sizes and find
typical radii of 50-200 AU. As such, gas disks in the ONC are compact in
comparison with the gas disks seen in low-density star-forming regions. Gas
sizes are universally larger than the dust sizes. However, the gas and dust
sizes are not strongly correlated. We find a positive correlation between gas
size and distance from the massive star Ori C, indicating that disks
in the ONC are influenced by photoionization. Finally, we use the observed
kinematics of the detected gas lines to model Keplerian rotation and infer the
masses of the central pre-main-sequence stars. Our dynamically-derived stellar
masses are not consistent with the spectroscopically-derived masses, and we
discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy.Comment: 42 pages, 31 figure
Coping with speaker-related variation via abstract phonemic categories
Listeners can cope with considerable variation in the way that different speakers talk. We argue here that they can do so because of a process of phonological abstraction in the speech-recognition system. We review evidence that listeners adjust the bounds of phonemic categories after only very limited exposure to a deviant realisation of a given phoneme. This learning can be talker-specific and is stable over time; further, the learning generalizes to previously unheard words containing the deviant phoneme. Together these results suggest that the learning involves adjustment of prelexical phonemic representations which mediate between the speech signal and the mental lexicon during word recognition. We argue that such an abstraction process is inconsistent with claims made by some recent models of language processing that the mental lexicon consists solely of multiple detailed traces of acoustic episodes. Simulations with a purely episodic model without functional prelexical abstraction confirm that such a model cannot account for the evidence on lexical generalization of perceptual learning. We conclude that abstract phonemic categories form a necessary part of lexical access, and that the ability to store talker-specific knowledge about those categories provides listeners with the means to deal with cross-talker variation
Spatially and Spectrally Resolved Hydrogen Gas within 0.1 AU of T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be Stars
We present near-infrared observations of T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be stars with
a spatial resolution of a few milli-arcseconds and a spectral resolution of
~2000. Our observations spatially resolve gas and dust in the inner regions of
protoplanetary disks, and spectrally resolve broad-linewidth emission from the
Brackett gamma transition of hydrogen gas. We use the technique of
spectro-astrometry to determine centroids of different velocity components of
this gaseous emission at a precision orders of magnitude better than the
angular resolution. In all sources, we find the gaseous emission to be more
compact than or distributed on similar spatial scales to the dust emission. We
attempt to fit the data with models including both dust and Brackett
gamma-emitting gas, and we consider both disk and infall/outflow morphologies
for the gaseous matter. In most cases where we can distinguish between these
two models, the data show a preference for infall/outflow models. In all cases,
our data appear consistent with the presence of some gas at stellocentric radii
of ~0.01 AU. Our findings support the hypothesis that Brackett gamma emission
generally traces magnetospherically driven accretion and/or outflows in young
star/disk systems.Comment: 48 pages, including 17 figures. Accepted for publication by Ap
A VLA Survey For Faint Compact Radio Sources in the Orion Nebula Cluster
We present Karl G. Janksy Very Large Array (VLA) 1.3 cm, 3.6 cm, and 6 cm
continuum maps of compact radio sources in the Orion Nebular Cluster. We
mosaicked 34 square arcminutes at 1.3 cm, 70 square arcminutes at 3.6 cm and
109 square arcminutes at 6 cm, containing 778 near-infrared detected YSOs and
190 HST-identified proplyds (with significant overlap between those
characterizations). We detected radio emission from 175 compact radio sources
in the ONC, including 26 sources that were detected for the first time at these
wavelengths. For each detected source we fit a simple free-free and dust
emission model to characterize the radio emission. We extrapolate the free-free
emission spectrum model for each source to ALMA bands to illustrate how these
measurements could be used to correctly measure protoplanetary disk dust masses
from sub-millimeter flux measurements. Finally, we compare the fluxes measured
in this survey with previously measured fluxes for our targets, as well as four
separate epochs of 1.3 cm data, to search for and quantify variability of our
sources.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, ApJ, in pres
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