45,076 research outputs found
The Cocoon Nebula and its ionizing star: do stellar and nebular abundances agree?
(Abridged) Main sequence massive stars embedded in an HII region should have
the same chemical abundances as the surrounding nebular gas+dust. The Cocoon
nebula, a close-by Galactic HII region ionized by a narrow line B0.5 V single
star (BD+46 3474), is an ideal target to perform a detailed comparison of
nebular and stellar abundances in the same Galactic HII region. We investigate
the chemical content of O, N and S in the Cocoon nebula from two different
points of view: an empirical analysis of the nebular spectrum and a detailed
spectroscopic analysis of its ionizing B-type star using state-of-the-art
stellar atmosphere modeling. By comparing the stellar and nebular abundances,
we aim to indirectly address the long-standing problem of the discrepancy found
between abundances obtained from collisionally excited lines (CELs) and optical
recombination lines in photoionized nebulae. We collect spatially resolved
spectroscopy of the Cocoon nebula and a high resolution optical spectrum of its
ionizing star. Standard nebular techniques are used to compute the physical
conditions and gaseous abundances of O, N and S. We perform a self-consistent
spectroscopic abundance analysis of BD+46 3474 based on the atmosphere code
FASTWIND to determine the stellar parameters and Si, O, and N abundances. The
Cocoon nebula and its ionizing star, located at a distance of 800+-80 pc, have
a very similar chemical composition as the Orion nebula and other B-type stars
in the solar vicinity. This result agrees with the high degree of homogeneity
of the present-day composition of the solar neighbourhood as derived from the
study of the local cold-gas ISM. The comparison of stellar and nebular CELs
abundances in the Cocoon nebula indicates that O and N gas+dust nebular values
are in better agreement with stellar ones assuming small temperature
fluctuations, of the order of those found in the Orion nebula.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. 13 pages, 7 tables and 6 figure
Limits to the analogue Hawking temperature in a Bose-Einstein condensate
Quasi-one dimensional outflow from a dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate
reservoir is a promising system for the creation of analogue Hawking radiation.
We use numerical modeling to show that stable sonic horizons exist in such a
system under realistic conditions, taking into account the transverse
dimensions and three-body loss. We find that loss limits the analogue Hawking
temperatures achievable in the hydrodynamic regime, with sodium condensates
allowing the highest temperatures. A condensate of 30,000 atoms, with
transverse confinement frequency omega_perp=6800*2*pi Hz, yields horizon
temperatures of about 20 nK over a period of 50 ms. This is at least four times
higher than for other atoms commonly used for Bose-Einstein condensates.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, replaced with published versio
Evaluation of four different strategies to characterize plasma membrane proteins from banana roots
Plasma membrane proteins constitute a very important class of proteins. They are involved in the transmission of external signals to the interior of the cell and selective transport of water, nutrients and ions across the plasma membrane. However, the study of plasma membrane proteins is challenging because of their poor solubility in aqueous media and low relative abundance. In this work, we evaluated four different strategies for the characterization of plasma membrane proteins from banana roots: (i) the aqueous-polymer two-phase system technique (ATPS) coupled to gelelectrophoresis (gel-based), and (ii) ATPS coupled to LC-MS/MS (gel free), (iii) a microsomal fraction and (iv) a full proteome, both coupled to LC-MS/ MS. Our results show that the gel-based strategy is useful for protein visualization but has major limitations in terms of time reproducibility and efficiency. From the gel-free strategies, the microsomal-based strategy allowed the highest number of plasma membrane proteins to be identified, followed by the full proteome strategy and by the ATPS based strategy. The high yield of plasma membrane proteins provided by the microsomal fraction can be explained by the enrichment of membrane proteins in this fraction and the high throughput of the gel-free approach combined with the usage of a fast high-resolution mass spectrometer for the identification of proteins
Measurements and Information in Spin Foam Models
We present a problem relating measurements and information theory in spin
foam models. In the three dimensional case of quantum gravity we can compute
probabilities of spin network graphs and study the behaviour of the Shannon
entropy associated to the corresponding information. We present a general
definition, compute the Shannon entropy of some examples, and find some
interesting inequalities.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Improved versio
- …