68 research outputs found

    First records of Lasiurus cinereus and L. borealis (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada

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    Publisher's Version/PDFIn August 2012, a Lasiurus cinereus (Hoary Bat) and 2 Lasiurus borealis (Eastern Red Bat) were netted near Donkin, Cape Breton Island, NS, Canada. Acoustic studies showed the presence of Hoary Bats on at least 3 nights and Eastern Red Bats on at least 16 nights, over a 32-night-long survey starting on 21 August 2012. These records are the first for both species on Cape Breton Island, and significantly extend the known distribution of Eastern Red Bats.</p

    Proper Motions of Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies from Hubble Space Telescope Imaging. III: Measurement for Ursa Minor

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    This article presents a measurement of the proper motion of the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy determined from images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in two distinct fields.Comment: AJ, accepted; 23 pages, 17 figures (Fig. 1 abridged), 5 table

    PEXO : a global modeling framework for nanosecond timing, microsecond astrometry, and ÎŒm/s radial velocities

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    54 pages, 2 tables, 19 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS, PEXO is available at https://github.com/phillippro/pexoThe ability to make independent detections of the signatures of exoplanets with complementary telescopes and instruments brings a new potential for robust identification of exoplanets and precision characterization. We introduce PEXO, a package for Precise EXOplanetology to facilitate the efficient modeling of timing, astrometry, and radial velocity data, which will benefit not only exoplanet science but also various astrophysical studies in general. PEXO is general enough to account for binary motion and stellar reflex motions induced by planetary companions and is precise enough to treat various relativistic effects both in the solar system and in the target system. We also model the post-Newtonian barycentric motion for future tests of general relativity in extrasolar systems. We benchmark PEXO with the pulsar timing package TEMPO2 and find that PEXO produces numerically similar results with timing precision of about 1 ns, space-based astrometry to a precision of 1{\mu}as, and radial velocity of 1 {\mu}m/s and improves on TEMPO2 for decade-long timing data of nearby targets, due to its consideration of third-order terms of Roemer delay. PEXO is able to avoid the bias introduced by decoupling the target system and the solar system and to account for the atmospheric effects which set a practical limit for ground-based radial velocities close to 1 cm/s. Considering the various caveats in barycentric correction and ancillary data required to realize cm/s modeling, we recommend the preservation of original observational data. The PEXO modeling package is available at GitHub (https://github.com/phillippro/pexo).Peer reviewe

    Astrometry and Photometry for Cool Dwarfs and Brown Dwarfs

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    Trigonometric parallax determinations are presented for 28 late type dwarfs and brown dwarfs, including eight M dwarfs with spectral types between M7 and M9.5, 17 L dwarfs with spectral types between L0 and L8, and three T dwarfs. Broadband photometry at CCD wavelengths (VRIz) and/or near-IR wavelengths (JHK) are presented for these objects and for 24 additional late-type dwarfs. Supplemented with astrometry and photometry from the literature, including ten L and two T dwarfs with parallaxes established by association with bright, usually HIPPARCOS primaries, this material forms the basis for studying various color-color and color-absolute magnitude relations. The I-J color is a good predictor of absolute magnitude for late-M and L dwarfs. M_J becomes monotonically fainter with I-J color and with spectral type through late-L dwarfs, then brightens for early-T dwarfs. The combination of zJK colors alone can be used to classify late-M, early-L, and T dwarfs accurately, and to predict their absolute magnitudes, but is less effective at untangling the scatter among mid- and late-L dwarfs. The mean tangential velocity of these objects is found to be slightly less than that for dM stars in the solar neighborhood, consistent with a sample with a mean age of several Gyr. Using colors to estimate bolometric corrections, and models to estimate stellar radii, effective temperatures are derived. The latest L dwarfs are found to have T_eff ~ 1360 K.Comment: 48 pages, including 7 figures and 6 tables. Accepted for A

    A chemical survey of exoplanets with ARIEL

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    Thousands of exoplanets have now been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits: from rocky Earth-like planets to large gas giants grazing the surface of their host star. However, the essential nature of these exoplanets remains largely mysterious: there is no known, discernible pattern linking the presence, size, or orbital parameters of a planet to the nature of its parent star. We have little idea whether the chemistry of a planet is linked to its formation environment, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet’s birth, and evolution. ARIEL was conceived to observe a large number (~1000) of transiting planets for statistical understanding, including gas giants, Neptunes, super-Earths and Earth-size planets around a range of host star types using transit spectroscopy in the 1.25–7.8 ÎŒm spectral range and multiple narrow-band photometry in the optical. ARIEL will focus on warm and hot planets to take advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres which should show minimal condensation and sequestration of high-Z materials compared to their colder Solar System siblings. Said warm and hot atmospheres are expected to be more representative of the planetary bulk composition. Observations of these warm/hot exoplanets, and in particular of their elemental composition (especially C, O, N, S, Si), will allow the understanding of the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation during the nebular phase and the following few million years. ARIEL will thus provide a representative picture of the chemical nature of the exoplanets and relate this directly to the type and chemical environment of the host star. ARIEL is designed as a dedicated survey mission for combined-light spectroscopy, capable of observing a large and well-defined planet sample within its 4-year mission lifetime. Transit, eclipse and phase-curve spectroscopy methods, whereby the signal from the star and planet are differentiated using knowledge of the planetary ephemerides, allow us to measure atmospheric signals from the planet at levels of 10–100 part per million (ppm) relative to the star and, given the bright nature of targets, also allows more sophisticated techniques, such as eclipse mapping, to give a deeper insight into the nature of the atmosphere. These types of observations require a stable payload and satellite platform with broad, instantaneous wavelength coverage to detect many molecular species, probe the thermal structure, identify clouds and monitor the stellar activity. The wavelength range proposed covers all the expected major atmospheric gases from e.g. H2O, CO2, CH4 NH3, HCN, H2S through to the more exotic metallic compounds, such as TiO, VO, and condensed species. Simulations of ARIEL performance in conducting exoplanet surveys have been performed – using conservative estimates of mission performance and a full model of all significant noise sources in the measurement – using a list of potential ARIEL targets that incorporates the latest available exoplanet statistics. The conclusion at the end of the Phase A study, is that ARIEL – in line with the stated mission objectives – will be able to observe about 1000 exoplanets depending on the details of the adopted survey strategy, thus confirming the feasibility of the main science objectives.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

    Self-love and sociability: the ‘rudiments of commerce’ in the state of nature

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    Istvan Hont’s classic work on the theoretical links between the seventeenth-century natural jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists remains a popular trope among intellectual and economic historians of various stamps. Despite this, a common criticism levelled at Hont remains his relative lack of engagement with the relationship between religion and economics in the early modern period. This paper challenges this aspect of Hont’s narrative by drawing attention to an alternative, albeit complementary, assessment of the natural jurisprudential heritage of eighteenth-century British political economy. Specifically, the article attempts to map on to Hont’s thesis the Christian Stoic interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf which has gained greater currency in recent years. In doing so, the paper argues that Grotius and Pufendorf’s contributions to the ‘unsocial sociability’ debate do not necessarily lead directly to the Scottish school of political economists, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it contends that a reconsideration of Grotius and Pufendorf as neo-Stoic theorists, particularly via scrutiny of their respective adaptations of the traditional Stoic theory of oikeiosis, steers us towards the heart of the early English ‘clerical’ Enlightenment

    Corrigendum to "Overview: oxidant and particle photochemical processes above a south-east Asian tropical rainforest (the OP3 project): introduction, rationale, location characteristics and tools" published in Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 169–199, 2010

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    Author(s): Hewitt, CN; Lee, JD; MacKenzie, AR; Barkley, MP; Carslaw, N; Carver, GD; Chappell, NA; Coe, H; Collier, C; Commane, R; Davies, F; Davison, B; DiCarlo, P; Di Marco, CF; Dorsey, JR; Edwards, PM; Evans, MJ; Fowler, D; Furneaux, KL; Gallagher, M; Guenther, A; Heard, DE; Helfter, C; Hopkins, J; Ingham, T; Irwin, M; Jones, C; Karunaharan, A; Langford, B; Lewis, AC; Lim, SF; MacDonald, SM; Mahajan, AS; Malpass, S; McFiggans, G; Mills, G; Misztal, P; Moller, S; Monks, PS; Nemitz, E; Nicolas-Perea, V; Oetjen, H; Oram, DE; Palmer, PI; Phillips, GJ; Pike, R; Plane, JMC; Pugh, T; Pyle, JA; Reeves, CE; Robinson, NH; Stewart, D; Stone, D; Whalley, LK; Yang,

    Factors influencing terrestriality in primates of the Americas and Madagascar

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    Among mammals, the order Primates is exceptional in having a high taxonomic richness in which the taxa are arboreal, semiterrestrial, or terrestrial. Although habitual terrestriality is pervasive among the apes and African and Asian monkeys (catarrhines), it is largely absent among monkeys of the Americas (platyrrhines), as well as galagos, lemurs, and lorises (strepsirrhines), which are mostly arboreal. Numerous ecological drivers and species-specific factors are suggested to set the conditions for an evolutionary shift from arboreality to terrestriality, and current environmental conditions may provide analogous scenarios to those transitional periods. Therefore, we investigated predominantly arboreal, diurnal primate genera from the Americas and Madagascar that lack fully terrestrial taxa, to determine whether ecological drivers (habitat canopy cover, predation risk, maximum temperature, precipitation, primate species richness, human population density, and distance to roads) or species-specific traits (bodymass, group size, and degree of frugivory) associate with increased terrestriality. We collated 150,961 observation hours across 2,227 months from 47 species at 20 sites in Madagascar and 48 sites in the Americas. Multiple factors were associated with ground use in these otherwise arboreal species, including increased temperature, a decrease in canopy cover, a dietary shift away from frugivory, and larger group size. These factors mostly explain intraspecific differences in terrestriality. As humanity modifies habitats and causes climate change, our results suggest that species already inhabiting hot, sparsely canopied sites, and exhibiting more generalized diets, are more likely to shift toward greater ground use

    TOI-836 : a super-Earth and mini-Neptune transiting a nearby K-dwarf

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    Funding: TGW, ACC, and KH acknowledge support from STFC consolidated grant numbers ST/R000824/1 and ST/V000861/1, and UKSA grant ST/R003203/1.We present the discovery of two exoplanets transiting TOI-836 (TIC 440887364) using data from TESS Sector 11 and Sector 38. TOI-836 is a bright (T = 8.5 mag), high proper motion (∌200 mas yr−1), low metallicity ([Fe/H]≈−0.28) K-dwarf with a mass of 0.68 ± 0.05 M⊙ and a radius of 0.67 ± 0.01 R⊙. We obtain photometric follow-up observations with a variety of facilities, and we use these data-sets to determine that the inner planet, TOI-836 b, is a 1.70 ± 0.07 R⊕ super-Earth in a 3.82 day orbit, placing it directly within the so-called ‘radius valley’. The outer planet, TOI-836 c, is a 2.59 ± 0.09 R⊕ mini-Neptune in an 8.60 day orbit. Radial velocity measurements reveal that TOI-836 b has a mass of 4.5 ± 0.9 M⊕, while TOI-836 c has a mass of 9.6 ± 2.6 M⊕. Photometric observations show Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) on the order of 20 minutes for TOI-836 c, although there are no detectable TTVs for TOI-836 b. The TTVs of planet TOI-836 c may be caused by an undetected exterior planet.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

    TOI-836: A super-Earth and mini-Neptune transiting a nearby K-dwarf

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    We present the discovery of two exoplanets transiting TOI-836 (TIC 440887364) using data from TESS Sector 11 and Sector 38. TOI-836 is a bright (T=8.5T = 8.5 mag), high proper motion (∌ 200\sim\,200 mas yr−1^{-1}), low metallicity ([Fe/H]≈ −0.28\approx\,-0.28) K-dwarf with a mass of 0.68±0.050.68\pm0.05 M⊙_{\odot} and a radius of 0.67±0.010.67\pm0.01 R⊙_{\odot}. We obtain photometric follow-up observations with a variety of facilities, and we use these data-sets to determine that the inner planet, TOI-836 b, is a 1.70±0.071.70\pm0.07 R⊕_{\oplus} super-Earth in a 3.82 day orbit, placing it directly within the so-called 'radius valley'. The outer planet, TOI-836 c, is a 2.59±0.092.59\pm0.09 R⊕_{\oplus} mini-Neptune in an 8.60 day orbit. Radial velocity measurements reveal that TOI-836 b has a mass of 4.5±0.94.5\pm0.9 M⊕_{\oplus} , while TOI-836 c has a mass of 9.6±2.69.6\pm2.6 M⊕_{\oplus}. Photometric observations show Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) on the order of 20 minutes for TOI-836 c, although there are no detectable TTVs for TOI-836 b. The TTVs of planet TOI-836 c may be caused by an undetected exterior planet
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