10,038 research outputs found
Comparative Planetary Atmospheres: Models of TrES-1 and HD209458b
We present new self-consistent atmosphere models for transiting planets
TrES-1 and HD209458b. The planets were recently observed with the Spitzer Space
Telescope in bands centered on 4.5 and 8.0 m, for TrES-1, and 24 m,
for HD209458b. We find that standard solar metallicity models fit the
observations for HD209458b. For TrES-1, which has an T_eff ~300 K cooler, we
find that models with a metallicity 3-5 times enhanced over solar abundances
can match the 1 error bar at 4.5 m and 2 at 8.0m.
Models with solar abundances that included energy deposition into the
stratosphere give fluxes that fall within the 2 error bars in both
bands. The best-fit models for both planets assume that reradiation of absorbed
stellar flux occurs over the entire planet. For all models of both planets we
predict planet/star flux ratios in other Spitzer bandpasses.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, May 17, 200
pp Wave Big Bangs: Matrix Strings and Shrinking Fuzzy Spheres
We find pp wave solutions in string theory with null-like linear dilatons.
These provide toy models of big bang cosmologies. We formulate Matrix String
Theory in these backgrounds. Near the big bang ``singularity'', the string
theory becomes strongly coupled but the Yang-Mills description of the matrix
string is weakly coupled. The presence of a second length scale allows us to
focus on a specific class of non-abelian configurations, viz. fuzzy cylinders,
for a suitable regime of parameters. We show that, for a class of pp waves,
fuzzy cylinders which start out big at early times dynamically shrink into
usual strings at sufficiently late times.Comment: 29 pages, ReVTeX and AMSLaTeX. 4 Figures. v2: Typo corrected and
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E7(7) invariant Lagrangian of d=4 N=8 supergravity
We present an E7(7) invariant Lagrangian that leads to the equations of
motion of d=4 N=8 supergravity without using Lagrange multipliers. The
superinvariance of this new action and the closure of the supersymmetry algebra
are proved explicitly for the terms that differ from the Cremmer--Julia
formulation. Since the diffeomorphism symmetry is not realized in the standard
way on the vector fields, we switch to the Hamiltonian formulation in order to
prove the invariance of the E7(7) invariant action under general coordinate
transformations. We also construct the conserved E7(7)-Noether current of
maximal supergravity and we conclude with comments on the implications of this
manifest off-shell E7(7)-symmetry for quantizing d=4 N=8 supergravity, in
particular on the E7(7)-action on phase space.Comment: 45 pages, references adde
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