Variability of the Martian thermosphere during eight Martian years as simulated by a ground-to-exosphere global circulation model

Using a ground-to-exosphere general circulation model for Mars we have simulated the variability of the dayside temperatures at the exobase during eight Martian years (MY, from MY24 to MY31, approximately from 1998 to 2013), taking into account the observed day-to-day solar and dust load variability. We show that the simulated temperatures are in good agreement with the exospheric temperatures derived from Precise Orbit Determination of Mars Global Surveyor. We then study the effects of the solar variability and of two planetary-encircling dust storms on the simulated temperatures. The seasonal effect produced by the large eccentricity of the Martian orbit translates in an aphelion-to-perihelion temperature contrast in every simulated year. However, the magnitude of this seasonal temperature variation is strongly affected by the solar conditions, ranging from 50 K for years corresponding to solar minimum conditions to almost 140 K during the last solar maximum. The 27 day solar rotation cycle is observed on the simulated temperatures at the exobase, with average amplitude of the temperature oscillation of 2.6 K but with a significant interannual variability. These two results highlight the importance of taking into account the solar variability when simulating the Martian upper atmosphere and likely have important implications concerning the atmospheric escape rate. We also show that the global dust storms in MY25 and MY28 have a significant effect on the simulated temperatures. In general, they increase the exospheric temperatures over the low latitude and midlatitude regions and decrease them in the polar regions.©2015. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.F.G.G. was partly funded by a CSIC JAE-Doc grant financed by the European Social Fund. F.G.G., M.-A.L.V., and M.G.C. thank the Spanish MICINN for funding support through the CONSOLIDER program ASTROMOLCSD2009-00038 and through projects AYA2011-23552/ESP and AYA2012-39691-C02-01. This work has also been partially funded by the ESA-CNES project Mars Climate Database and Physical Models.Peer Reviewe

Aerosols and Water Ice in Jupiter's Stratosphere from UV-NIR Ground-based Observations

Jupiter's atmosphere has been sounded in transmission from the UV to the IR, as if it were a transiting exoplanet, by observing Ganymede while passing through Jupiter's shadow. The spectra show strong extinction due to the presence of aerosols and haze in Jupiter's atmosphere and strong absorption features of methane. Here, we report a new detailed analysis of these observations, with special emphasis on the retrievals of the vertical distribution of the aerosols and their sizes, and the properties and distribution of the stratospheric water ice. Our analysis suggests the presence of aerosols near the equator in the altitude range of 100 hPa up to at least 0.01 hPa, with a layer of small particles (mean radius of 0.1 μm) in the upper part (above 0.1 hPa), an intermediate layer of aerosols with a radius of 0.3 μm, extending between ∼10 and 0.01 hPa, and a layer with larger sizes of ∼0.6 μm at approximately 100-1 hPa. The corresponding loads for each layer are ∼2 × 10 g cm, ∼3.4 × 10 g cm, and ∼1.5 × 10 g cm, respectively, with a total load of ∼2.0 × 10 g cm. The lower and middle layers agree well with previous measurements; but the finer particles of 0.1 μm above 0.01 hPa have not been reported before. The spectra also show two broad features near 1.5 and 2.0 μm, which we attribute to a layer of very small (∼10 nm) HO crystalline ice in Jupiter's lower stratosphere (∼0.5 hPa). While these spectral signatures seem to be unequivocally attributable to crystalline water ice, they require a large amount of water ice to explain the strong absorption features.© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We are very grateful to Rafael Escribano, Victor Herrero, Anni Maattanen, Beatriz Mate, Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, and Miguel Angel Satorre for very valuable discussions on the water ice topic. The IAA team was supported by the Spanish MICINN under projects ESP2014-54362-P, ESP2017-87143-R, and EC FEDER funds. This work is also partly financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness through grant ESP2013-48391-C4-2-R. M.G.C. is also supported by the MINECO under its >Ramon y Cajal> subprogram

MIPAS temperature from the stratosphere to the lower thermosphere: Comparison of vM21 with ACE-FTS, MLS, OSIRIS, SABER, SOFIE and lidar measurements

© Author(s) 2014. We present vM21 MIPAS temperatures from the lower stratosphere to the lower thermosphere, which cover all optimized resolution measurements performed by MIPAS in the middle-atmosphere, upper-atmosphere and noctilucent-cloud modes during its lifetime, i.e., from January 2005 to April 2012. The main upgrades with respect to the previous version of MIPAS temperatures (vM11) are the update of the spectroscopic database, the use of a different climatology of atomic oxygen and carbon dioxide, and the improvement in important technical aspects of the retrieval setup (temperature gradient along the line of sight and offset regularizations, apodization accuracy). Additionally, an updated version of ESA-calibrated L1b spectra (5.02/5.06) is used. The vM21 temperatures correct the main systematic errors of the previous version because they provide on average a 1-2 K warmer stratopause and middle mesosphere, and a 6-10 K colder mesopause (except in high-latitude summers) and lower thermosphere. These lead to a remarkable improvement in MIPAS comparisons with ACE-FTS, MLS, OSIRIS, SABER, SOFIE and the two Rayleigh lidars at Mauna Loa and Table Mountain, which, with a few specific exceptions, typically exhibit differences smaller than 1 K below 50 km and than 2 K at 50-80 km in spring, autumn and winter at all latitudes, and summer at low to midlatitudes. Differences in the high-latitude summers are typically smaller than 1 K below 50 km, smaller than 2 K at 50-65 km and 5 K at 65-80 km. Differences between MIPAS and the other instruments in the mid-mesosphere are generally negative. MIPAS mesopause is within 4 K of the other instruments measurements, except in the high-latitude summers, when it is within 5-10 K, being warmer there than SABER, MLS and OSIRIS and colder than ACE-FTS and SOFIE. The agreement in the lower thermosphere is typically better than 5 K, except for high latitudes during spring and summer, when MIPAS usually exhibits larger vertical gradients.M. Garcia-Comas was financially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) through its >Ramon y Cajal> subprogram. The IAA team was supported by the Spanish MINECO, through project AYA2011-23552, the CONSOLIDER program CSD2009-00038, and EC FEDER funds. Funding for ACE comes primarily from the Canadian Space Agency. We thank ESA for providing MIPAS level-1b data.Peer Reviewe

Ancient and modern mitogenomes from Central Argentina: New insights into population continuity, temporal depth and migration in South America

The inverted triangle shape of South America places Argentina territory as a geographical crossroads between the two principal peopling streams that followed either the Pacific or the Atlantic coasts, which could have then merged in Central Argentina (CA). Although the genetic diversity from this region is therefore crucial to decipher past population movements in South America, its characterization has been overlooked so far. We report 92 modern and 22 ancient mitogenomes spanning a temporal range of 5000 years, which were compared with a large set of previously reported data. Leveraging this dataset representative of the mitochondrial diversity of the subcontinent, we investigate the maternal history of CA populations within a wider geographical context. We describe a large number of novel clades within the mitochondrial DNA tree, thus providing new phylogenetic interpretations for South America. We also identify several local clades of great temporal depth with continuity until the present time, which stem directly from the founder haplotypes, suggesting that they originated in the region and expanded from there. Moreover, the presence of lineages characteristic of other South American regions reveals the existence of gene flow to CA. Finally, we report some lineages with discontinuous distribution across the Americas, which suggest the persistence of relic lineages likely linked to the first population arrivals. The present study represents to date the most exhaustive attempt to elaborate a Native American genetic map from modern and ancient complete mitochondrial genomes in Argentina and provides relevant information about the general process of settlement in South America.This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación (PICT 2007-1549, PICT 2012-711 and PICT 2015-3155), Secretaría de Ciencia y Tecnología (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Provincia de Córdoba (PID 2018-79) and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (2015-11220150100953CO). M.P. is a postdoctoral fellow and A.G., R.N., J.M.B.M, C.M.B., M.F. and D.A.D. are research career members of CONICET, Argentina

MIPAS observations of ozone in the middle atmosphere

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.In this paper we describe the stratospheric and mesospheric ozone (version V5r-O3-m22) distributions retrieved from MIPAS observations in the three middle atmosphere modes (MA, NLC, and UA) taken with an unapodized spectral resolution of 0.0625 cm from 2005 until April 2012. O is retrieved from microwindows in the 14.8 and 10 μm spectral regions and requires non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) modelling of the O and vibrational levels. Ozone is reliably retrieved from 20 km in the MA mode (40 km for UA and NLC) up to ∼105 km during dark conditions and up to ∼95 km during illuminated conditions. Daytime MIPAS O has an average vertical resolution of 3-4 km below 70 km, 6-8 km at 70-80 km, 8-10 km at 80-90, and 5-7 km at the secondary maximum (90-100 km). For nighttime conditions, the vertical resolution is similar below 70 km and better in the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere: 4-6 km at 70-100 km, 4-5 km at the secondary maximum, and 6-8 km at 100-105 km. The noise error for daytime conditions is typically smaller than 2% below 50 km, 2-10% between 50 and 70 km, 10-20% at 70-90 km, and ∼30% above 95 km. For nighttime, the noise errors are very similar below around 70 km but significantly smaller above, being 10-20% at 75-95 km, 20-30% at 95-100 km, and larger than 30% above 100 km. The additional major O errors are the spectroscopic data uncertainties below 50 km (10-12 %) and the non-LTE and temperature errors above 70 km. The validation performed suggests that the spectroscopic errors below 50 km, mainly caused by the O air-broadened half-widths of the band, are overestimated. The non-LTE error (including the uncertainty of atomic oxygen in nighttime) is relevant only above ∼85 km with values of 15-20 %. The temperature error varies from ∼3% up to 80 km to 15-20% near 100 km. Between 50 and 70 km, the pointing and spectroscopic errors are the dominant uncertainties. The validation performed in comparisons with SABER, GOMOS, MLS, SMILES, and ACE-FTS shows that MIPAS O has an accuracy better than 5% at and below 50 km, with a positive bias of a few percent. In the 50-75 km region, MIPAS O has a positive bias of ∼10 %, which is possibly caused in part by O spectroscopic errors in the 10 μm region. Between 75 and 90 km, MIPAS nighttime O is in agreement with other instruments by 10 %, but for daytime the agreement is slightly larger, ∼10-20 %. Above 90 km, MIPAS daytime O is in agreement with other instruments by 10 %. At night, however, it shows a positive bias increasing from 10% at 90 km to 20% at 95-100 km, the latter of which is attributed to the large atomic oxygen abundance used. We also present MIPAS O distributions as function of altitude, latitude, and time, showing the major O features in the middle and upper mesosphere. In addition to the rapid diurnal variation due to photochemistry, the data also show apparent signatures of the diurnal migrating tide during both day-and nighttime, as well as the effects of the semi-Annual oscillation above ∼70 km in the tropics and mid-latitudes. The tropical. daytime O at 90 km shows a solar signature in phase with the solar cycle. © Author(s) 2018.The IAA team was supported by the Spanish MICINN under the project ESP2014-54362-P and EC FEDER funds. The IAA and IMK teams were partially supported by ESA O3-CCI and MesosphEO projects. Maya Garcia-Comas was financially supported by MINECO through its >Ramon y Cajal> subprogram. Funding for the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment comes primarily from the Canadian Space Agency. Work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was performed under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

X-Ray Polarization Observations of BL Lacertae

Full list of authors: Middei, Riccardo; Liodakis, Ioannis; Perri, Matteo; Puccetti, Simonetta; Cavazzuti, Elisabetta; Di Gesu, Laura; Ehlert, Steven R.; Madejski, Grzegorz; Marscher, Alan P.; Marshall, Herman L.; Muleri, Fabio; Negro, Michela; Jorstad, Svetlana G.; Agis-Gonzalez, Beatriz; Agudo, Ivan; Bonnoli, Giacomo; Bernardos, Maria, I; Casanova, Victor; Garcia-Comas, Maya; Husillos, Cesar; Marchini, Alessandro; Sota, Alfredo; Kouch, Pouya M.; Lindfors, Elina; Borman, George A.; Kopatskaya, Evgenia N.; Larionova, Elena G.; Morozova, Daria A.; Savchenko, Sergey S.; Vasilyev, Andrey A.; Zhovtan, Alexey, V; Casadio, Carolina; Escudero, Juan; Myserlis, Ioannis; Hales, Antonio; Kameno, Seiji; Kneissl, Ruediger; Messias, Hugo; Nagai, Hiroshi; Blinov, Dmitry; Bourbah, Ioakeim G.; Kiehlmann, Sebastian; Kontopodis, Evangelos; Mandarakas, Nikos; Romanopoulos, Stylianos; Skalidis, Raphael; Vervelaki, Anna; Masiero, Joseph R.; Mawet, Dimitri; Millar-Blanchaer, Maxwell A.; Panopoulou, Georgia, V; Tinyanont, Samaporn; Berdyugin, Andrei, V; Kagitani, Masato; Kravtsov, Vadim; Sakanoi, Takeshi; Imazawa, Ryo; Sasada, Mahito; Fukazawa, Yasushi; Kawabata, Koji S.; Uemura, Makoto; Mizuno, Tsunefumi; Nakaoka, Tatsuya; Akitaya, Hiroshi; Gurwell, Mark; Rao, Ramprasad; Di Lalla, Niccolo; Cibrario, Nicolo; Donnarumma, Immacolata; Kim, Dawoon E.; Omodei, Nicola; Pacciani, Luigi; Poutanen, Juri; Tavecchio, Fabrizio; Antonelli, Lucio A.; Bachetti, Matteo; Baldini, Luca; Baumgartner, Wayne H.; Bellazzini, Ronaldo; Bianchi, Stefano; Bongiorno, Stephen D.; Bonino, Raffaella; Brez, Alessandro; Bucciantini, Niccolo; Capitanio, Fiamma; Castellano, Simone; Ciprini, Stefano; Costa, Enrico; De Rosa, Alessandra; Del Monte, Ettore; Di Marco, Alessandro; Doroshenko, Victor; Dovciak, Michal; Enoto, Teruaki; Evangelista, Yuri; Fabiani, Sergio; Ferrazzoli, Riccardo; Garcia, Javier A.; Gunji, Shuichi; Hayashida, Kiyoshi; Heyl, Jeremy; Iwakiri, Wataru; Karas, Vladimir; Kitaguchi, Takao; Kolodziejczak, Jeffery J.; Krawczynski, Henric; La Monaca, Fabio; Latronico, Luca; Maldera, Simone; Manfreda, Alberto; Marin, Frederic; Marinucci, Andrea; Massaro, Francesco; Matt, Giorgio; Mitsuishi, Ikuyuki; Ng, C-Y; O'Dell, Stephen L.; Oppedisano, Chiara; Papitto, Alessandro; Pavlov, George G.; Peirson, Abel L.; Pesce-Rollins, Melissa; Petrucci, Pierre-Olivier; Pilia, Maura; Possenti, Andrea; Ramsey, Brian D.; Rankin, John; Ratheesh, Ajay; Romani, Roger W.; Sgro, Carmelo; Slane, Patrick; Soffitta, Paolo; Spandre, Gloria; Tamagawa, Toru; Taverna, Roberto; Tawara, Yuzuru; Tennant, Allyn F.; Thomas, Nicholas E.; Tombesi, Francesco; Trois, Alessio; Tsygankov, Sergey; Turolla, Roberto; Vink, Jacco; Weisskopf, Martin C.; Wu, Kinwah; Xie, Fei; Zane, Silvia.--This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Blazars are a class of jet-dominated active galactic nuclei with a typical double-humped spectral energy distribution. It is of common consensus that the synchrotron emission is responsible for the low frequency peak, while the origin of the high frequency hump is still debated. The analysis of X-rays and their polarization can provide a valuable tool to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for the origin of high-energy emission of blazars. We report the first observations of BL Lacertae (BL Lac) performed with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, from which an upper limit to the polarization degree ΠX < 12.6% was found in the 2–8 keV band. We contemporaneously measured the polarization in radio, infrared, and optical wavelengths. Our multiwavelength polarization analysis disfavors a significant contribution of proton-synchrotron radiation to the X-ray emission at these epochs. Instead, it supports a leptonic origin for the X-ray emission in BL Lac. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is a joint US and Italian mission. The US contribution is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and led and managed by its Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), with industry partner Ball Aerospace (contract NNM15AA18C). The Italian contribution is supported by the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ASI) through contract ASI-OHBI-2017-12-I.0, agreements ASI-INAF-2017-12-H0 and ASI-INFN-2017.13-H0, and its Space Science Data Center (SSDC), and by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy. This research used data products provided by the IXPE Team (MSFC, SSDC, INAF, and INFN) and distributed with additional software tools by the High-Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). We acknowledge financial support from ASI-INAF agreement n. 2022-14-HH.0. The research at Boston University was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant AST-2108622 and NASA Swift Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC22K0537. This research has made use of data from the RoboPol program, a collaboration between Caltech, the University of Crete, IA-FORTH, IUCAA, the MPIfR, and the Nicolaus Copernicus University, which was conducted at Skinakas Observatory in Crete, Greece. The IAA-CSIC coauthors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion" (MCINN) through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award for the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía-CSIC (SEV-2017-0709). Acquisition and reduction of the POLAMI, TOP-MAPCAR, and OSN data was supported in part by MICINN through grants AYA2016-80889-P and PID2019-107847RB-C44. The POLAMI observations were carried out at the IRAM 30 m Telescope. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany), and IGN (Spain). This Letter makes use of the following ALMA director's discretionary time data under proposal ESO#2021.A.00016.T. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA), and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST, and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO, and NAOJ. Some of the data reported here are based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory as part of a continuing collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, NASA/JPL, Yale University, and the National Astronomical Observatories of China. This research made use of Photutils, an Astropy package for detection and photometry of astronomical sources (Bradley et al. 2019). G.V.P. acknowledges support by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51444.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. The data in this study include observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku, and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland, and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT. E.L. was supported by Academy of Finland projects 317636 and 320045. Part of the French contribution is supported by the Scientific Research National Center (CNRS) and the French Spatial Agency (CNES). Some of the data are based on observations collected at the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada, owned and operated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC). Further data are based on observations collected at the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (CAHA), operated jointly by Junta de Andalucía and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC). D.B., S.K., R.S., and N. M. acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 771282. C.C. acknowledges support by the European Research Council (ERC) under the HORIZON ERC Grants 2021 program under grant agreement No. 101040021. The Dipol-2 polarimeter was built in cooperation by the University of Turku, Finland, and the Leibniz Institut für Sonnenphysik, Germany, with support from the Leibniz Association grant SAW-2011-KIS-7. We are grateful to the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, for the allocated observing time. A.H. acknowledges The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work was supported by JST, the establishment of university fellowships toward the creation of science technology innovation; grant No. JPMJFS2129. This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grant Nos. JP21H01137. This work was also partially supported by Optical and Near-Infrared Astronomy Inter-University Cooperation Program from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan.With funding from the Spanish government through the "Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence" accreditation (CEX2021-001131-S).Peer reviewe

Polarized blazar X-rays imply particle acceleration in shocks

Full list of authors: Liodakis, Ioannis; Marscher, Alan P.; Agudo, Ivan; Berdyugin, Andrei V.; Bernardos, Maria I.; Bonnoli, Giacomo; Borman, George A.; Casadio, Carolina; Casanova, Victor; Cavazzuti, Elisabetta; Cavero, Nicole Rodriguez; Di Gesu, Laura; Di Lalla, Niccolo; Donnarumma, Immacolata; Ehlert, Steven R.; Errando, Manel; Escudero, Juan; Garcia-Comas, Maya; Agis-Gonzalez, Beatriz; Husillos, Cesar; Jormanainen, Jenni; Jorstad, Svetlana G.; Kagitani, Masato; Kopatskaya, Evgenia N.; Kravtsov, Vadim; Krawczynski, Henric; Lindfors, Elina; Larionova, Elena G.; Madejski, Grzegorz M.; Marin, Frederic; Marchini, Alessandro; Marshall, Herman L.; Morozova, Daria A.; Massaro, Francesco; Masiero, Joseph R.; Mawet, Dimitri; Middei, Riccardo; Millar-Blanchaer, Maxwell A.; Myserlis, Ioannis; Negro, Michela; Nilsson, Kari; O'Dell, Stephen L.; Omodei, Nicola; Pacciani, Luigi; Paggi, Alessandro; Panopoulou, Georgia V.; Peirson, Abel L.; Perri, Matteo; Petrucci, Pierre-Olivier; Poutanen, Juri; Puccetti, Simonetta; Romani, Roger W.; Sakanoi, Takeshi; Savchenko, Sergey S.; Sota, Alfredo; Tavecchio, Fabrizio; Tinyanont, Samaporn; Vasilyev, Andrey A.; Weaver, Zachary R.; Zhovtan, Alexey V.; Antonelli, Lucio A.; Bachetti, Matteo; Baldini, Luca; Baumgartner, Wayne H.; Bellazzini, Ronaldo; Bianchi, Stefano; Bongiorno, Stephen D.; Bonino, Raffaella; Brez, Alessandro; Bucciantini, Niccolo; Capitanio, Fiamma; Castellano, Simone; Ciprini, Stefano; Costa, Enrico; De Rosa, Alessandra; Del Monte, Ettore; Di Marco, Alessandro; Doroshenko, Victor; Dovciak, Michal; Enoto, Teruaki; Evangelista, Yuri; Fabiani, Sergio; Ferrazzoli, Riccardo; Garcia, Javier A.; Gunji, Shuichi; Hayashida, Kiyoshi; Heyl, Jeremy; Iwakiri, Wataru; Karas, Vladimir; Kitaguchi, Takao; Kolodziejczak, Jeffery J.; La Monaca, Fabio; Latronico, Luca; Maldera, Simone; Manfreda, Alberto; Marinucci, Andrea; Matt, Giorgio; Mitsuishi, Ikuyuki; Mizuno, Tsunefumi; Muleri, Fabio; Ng, Stephen C. -Y.; Oppedisano, Chiara; Papitto, Alessandro; Pavlov, George G.; Pesce-Rollins, Melissa; Pilia, Maura; Possenti, Andrea; Ramsey, Brian D.; Rankin, John; Ratheesh, Ajay; Sgro, Carmelo; Slane, Patrick; Soffitta, Paolo; Spandre, Gloria; Tamagawa, Toru; Taverna, Roberto; Tawara, Yuzuru; Tennant, Allyn F.; Thomas, Nicolas E.; Tombesi, Francesco; Trois, Alessio; Tsygankov, Sergey; Turolla, Roberto; Vink, Jacco; Weisskopf, Martin C.; Wu, Kinwah; Xie, Fei; Zane, Silvia.--This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Most of the light from blazars, active galactic nuclei with jets of magnetized plasma that point nearly along the line of sight, is produced by high-energy particles, up to around 1 TeV. Although the jets are known to be ultimately powered by a supermassive black hole, how the particles are accelerated to such high energies has been an unanswered question. The process must be related to the magnetic field, which can be probed by observations of the polarization of light from the jets. Measurements of the radio to optical polarization—the only range available until now—probe extended regions of the jet containing particles that left the acceleration site days to years earlier1,2,3, and hence do not directly explore the acceleration mechanism, as could X-ray measurements. Here we report the detection of X-ray polarization from the blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501). We measure an X-ray linear polarization degree ΠX of around 10%, which is a factor of around 2 higher than the value at optical wavelengths, with a polarization angle parallel to the radio jet. This points to a shock front as the source of particle acceleration and also implies that the plasma becomes increasingly turbulent with distance from the shock. © The Author(s) 2022.I.L. was supported by the JSPS postdoctoral short-term fellowship programme. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is a joint US and Italian mission. The US contribution is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and led and managed by its Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), with industry partner Ball Aerospace (contract NNM15AA18C). The Italian contribution is supported by the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ASI) through contract ASI-OHBI-2017-12-I.0, agreements ASI-INAF-2017-12-H0 and ASI-INFN-2017.13-H0, and its Space Science Data Center (SSDC) with agreements ASI-INAF-2022-14-HH.0 and ASI-INFN 2021-43-HH.0, and by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy. This research used data products provided by the IXPE Team (MSFC, SSDC, INAF and INFN) and distributed with additional software tools by the High-Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Data from the Steward Observatory spectropolarimetric monitoring project were used. This programme is supported by Fermi Guest Investigator grants NNX08AW56G, NNX09AU10G, NNX12AO93G and NNX15AU81G. This research has made use of data from the RoboPol programme, a collaboration between Caltech, the University of Crete, the Institute of Astrophysics-Foundation for Research and Technology (IA-FORTH), the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) and the Nicolaus Copernicus University, which was conducted at Skinakas Observatory in Crete, Greece. The Instituto Astrofísica Andalucía (IAA)-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) co-authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MCINN) through the ‘Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa‘ award for the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia-CSIC (SEV-2017-0709). Acquisition and reduction of the POLAMI and Monitoring AGN with Polarimetry at the Calar Alto Telescopes (MAPCAT) data were supported in part by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) through grants AYA2016-80889-P and PID2019-107847RB-C44. The POLAMI observations were carried out at the IRAM 30 m Telescope. IRAM is supported by the National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (INSU)/Scientific Research National Center (CNRS) (France), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG) (Germany) and Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) (Spain). The research at Boston University was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant AST-2108622, NASA Fermi Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC21K1917 and NASA Swift Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC22K0537. This study uses observations conducted with the 1.8 m Perkins Telescope Observatory in Arizona (USA), which is owned and operated by Boston University. Based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory as part of a continuing collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Yale University and the National Astronomical Observatories of China. This research made use of Photutils, an Astropy package for detection and photometry of astronomical sources60. G.V.P. acknowledges support by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant no. HST-HF2-51444.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained (in part) with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Optical Telescope. V.K. thanks the Vilho, Yrjö and Kalle Väisälä Foundation. J.J. was supported by Academy of Finland project 320085. E.L. was supported by Academy of Finland projects 317636 and 320045. Part of the French contribution was supported by the CNRS and the French spatial agency (CNES). Based on observations collected at the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada, owned and operated by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA-CSIC). Based on observations collected at the Centro Astronomico Hispano-Aleman (CAHA), proposal 22A-2.2-015, operated jointly by Junta de Andalucia and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (IAA-CSIC).Peer reviewe

X-Ray Polarization of BL Lacertae in Outburst

Full list of authors: Peirson, Abel L.; Negro, Michela; Liodakis, Ioannis; Middei, Riccardo; Kim, Dawoon E.; Marscher, Alan P.; Marshall, Herman L.; Pacciani, Luigi; Romani, Roger W.; Wu, Kinwah; Di Marco, Alessandro; Di Lalla, Niccolo; Omodei, Nicola; Jorstad, Svetlana G.; Agudo, Ivan; Kouch, Pouya M.; Lindfors, Elina; Aceituno, Francisco Jose; Bernardos, Maria I.; Bonnoli, Giacomo; Casanova, Victor; Garcia-Comas, Maya; Agis-Gonzalez, Beatriz; Husillos, Cesar; Marchini, Alessandro; Sota, Alfredo; Casadio, Carolina; Escudero, Juan; Myserlis, Ioannis; Sievers, Albrecht; Gurwell, Mark; Rao, Ramprasad; Imazawa, Ryo; Sasada, Mahito; Fukazawa, Yasushi; Kawabata, Koji S.; Uemura, Makoto; Mizuno, Tsunefumi; Nakaoka, Tatsuya; Akitaya, Hiroshi; Cheong, Yeon; Jeong, Hyeon-Woo; Kang, Sincheol; Kim, Sang-Hyun; Lee, Sang-Sung; Angelakis, Emmanouil; Kraus, Alexander; Cibrario, Nicolo; Donnarumma, Immacolata; Poutanen, Juri; Tavecchio, Fabrizio; Antonelli, Lucio A.; Bachetti, Matteo; Baldini, Luca; Baumgartner, Wayne H.; Bellazzini, Ronaldo; Bianchi, Stefano; Bongiorno, Stephen D.; Bonino, Raffaella; Brez, Alessandro; Bucciantini, Niccolo; Capitanio, Fiamma; Castellano, Simone; Cavazzuti, Elisabetta; Chen, Chien-Ting; Ciprini, Stefano; Costa, Enrico; De Rosa, Alessandra; Del Monte, Ettore; Di Gesu, Laura; Doroshenko, Victor; Dovciak, Michal; Ehlert, Steven R.; Enoto, Teruaki; Evangelista, Yuri; Fabiani, Sergio; Ferrazzoli, Riccardo; Garcia, Javier A.; Gunji, Shuichi; Hayashida, Kiyoshi; Heyl, Jeremy; Iwakiri, Wataru; Kaaret, Philip; Karas, Vladimir; Kitaguchi, Takao; Kolodziejczak, Jeffery J.; Krawczynski, Henric; La Monaca, Fabio; Latronico, Luca; Madejski, Grzegorz; Maldera, Simone; Manfreda, Alberto; Marin, Frederic; Marinucci, Andrea; Massaro, Francesco; Matt, Giorgio; Mitsuishi, Ikuyuki; Muleri, Fabio; Ng, C. -Y.; O'Dell, Stephen L.; Oppedisano, Chiara; Papitto, Alessandro; Pavlov, George G.; Perri, Matteo; Pesce-Rollins, Melissa; Petrucci, Pierre-Olivier; Pilia, Maura; Possenti, Andrea; Puccetti, Simonetta; Ramsey, Brian D.; Rankin, John; Ratheesh, Ajay; Roberts, Oliver J.; Sgro, Carmelo; Slane, Patrick; Soffitta, Paolo; Spandre, Gloria; Swartz, Douglas A.; Tamagawa, Toru; Taverna, Roberto; Tawara, Yuzuru; Tennant, Allyn F.; Thomas, Nicholas E.; Tombesi, Francesco; Trois, Alessio; Tsygankov, Sergey; Turolla, Roberto; Vink, Jacco; Weisskopf, Martin C.; Xie, Fei; Zane, Silvia.--This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We report the first >99% confidence detection of X-ray polarization in BL Lacertae. During a recent X-ray/γ-ray outburst, a 287 ks observation (2022 November 27–30) was taken using the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), together with contemporaneous multiwavelength observations from the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and XMM-Newton in soft X-rays (0.3–10 keV), NuSTAR in hard X-rays (3–70 keV), and optical polarization from the Calar Alto and Perkins Telescope observatories. Our contemporaneous X-ray data suggest that the IXPE energy band is at the crossover between the low- and high-frequency blazar emission humps. The source displays significant variability during the observation, and we measure polarization in three separate time bins. Contemporaneous X-ray spectra allow us to determine the relative contribution from each emission hump. We find >99% confidence X-ray polarization {{\rm{\Pi }}}_{2\mbox{--}4\mathrm{keV}}={21.7}_{-7.9}^{+5.6} \% and electric vector polarization angle ψ2–4keV = −28fdg7 ± 8fdg7 in the time bin with highest estimated synchrotron flux contribution. We discuss possible implications of our observations, including previous IXPE BL Lacertae pointings, tentatively concluding that synchrotron self-Compton emission dominates over hadronic emission processes during the observed epochs. © 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is a joint US and Italian mission. The US contribution is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and led and managed by its Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), with industry partner Ball Aerospace (contract NNM15AA18C). The Italian contribution is supported by the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ASI) through contract ASI-OHBI-2017-12-I.0, agreements ASI-INAF-2017-12-H0 and ASI-INFN-2017.13-H0, and its Space Science Data Center (SSDC) with agreements ASI-INAF-2022-14-HH.0 and ASI-INFN 2021-43-HH.0, and by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy. This research used data products provided by the IXPE Team (MSFC, SSDC, INAF, and INFN) and distributed with additional software tools by the High-Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Funding for this work was provided in part by contract 80MSFC17C0012 from the MSFC to MIT in support of the IXPE project. Support for this work was provided in part by the NASA through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) contract SV3-73016 to MIT for support of the Chandra X-Ray Center (CXC), which is operated by SAO for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060. The IAA-CSIC coauthors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación" (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) through the Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa award for the Instituto de Astrofíisica de Andalucía-CSIC (CEX2021-001131-S), and through grants PID2019-107847RB-C44 and PID2022-139117NB-C44. Some of the data are based on observations collected at the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada, owned and operated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC). Further data are based on observations collected at the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (CAHA), operated jointly by Junta de Andalucía and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC). The POLAMI observations were carried out at the IRAM 30 m Telescope. I.R.A.M. is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany), and IGN (Spain). The Submillimetre Array is a joint project between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica. Maunakea, the location of the SMA, is a culturally important site for the indigenous Hawaiian people; we are privileged to study the cosmos from its summit. The data in this study include observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku, and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland, and Norway, the University of Iceland, and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT. E.L. was supported by Academy of Finland projects 317636 and 320045. We acknowledge funding to support our NOT observations from the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA), University of Turku, Finland (Academy of Finland grant nr 306531). The research at Boston University was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant AST-2108622, NASA Fermi Guest Investigator grants 80NSSC21K1917 and 80NSSC22K1571, and NASA Swift Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC22K0537. This study used observations conducted with the 1.8 m Perkins Telescope Observatory (PTO) in Arizona (USA), which is owned and operated by Boston University. The above study is based in part on observations obtained with XMM-Newton, an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and NASA. We are grateful to the NuSTAR team for approving our DDT request. This work was supported under NASA contract No. NNG08FD60C, and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the NASA. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA). This work was supported by JST, the establishment of university fellowships toward the creation of science technology innovation, grant No. JPMJFS2129. This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grant No. JP21H01137. This work was also partially supported by Optical and Near-Infrared Astronomy Inter-University Cooperation Program from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. We are grateful to the observation and operating members of Kanata Telescope. M.N. acknowledges the support by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. C.C. acknowledges support by the ERC under the Horizon ERC Grants 2021 program under grant agreement no. 101040021. S.K., S.-S.L., W.Y.C., S.-H.K., and H.-W.J. were supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MIST; 2020R1A2C2009003). The KVN is a facility operated by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. The KVN operations are supported by KREONET (Korea Research Environment Open NETwork), which is managed and operated by KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information). Partly based on observations with the 100 m telescope of the MPIfR (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie) at Effelsberg. Observations with the 100 m radio telescope at Effelsberg have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101004719 (ORP). A.L.P. acknowledges support from NASA FINESST grant 80NSSC19K1407 and the Stanford Data Science Scholars program.Peer reviewe

CAIRT - The changing-atmosphere infra-red tomography explorer

Optics InfoBase Conference Papers2021 Article number FTh4G.6. Fourier Transform Spectroscopy, FTS 2021 - Part of OSA Optical Sensors and Sensing Congress 2021Virtual, Online19 July 2021 through 23 July 2021Code 174136CAIRT, a candidate for ESA’s Earth Explorer 11 mission, will observe the Earth’s limb with an imaging Fourier-transform spectrometer. It will provide global observations of ozone, temperature, water vapour and key halogen and nitrogen compounds.With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709Peer reviewe