327 research outputs found
Reionization by active sources and its effects on the cosmic microwave background
We investigate the possible effects of reionization by active sources on the
cosmic microwave background. We concentrate on the sources themselves as the
origin of reionization, rather than early object formation, introducing an
extra period of heating motivated by the active character of the perturbations.
Using reasonable parameters, this leads to four possibilities depending on the
time and duration of the energy input: delayed last scattering, double last
scattering, shifted last scattering and total reionization. We show that these
possibilities are only very weakly constrained by the limits on spectral
distortions from the COBE FIRAS measurements. We illustrate the effects of
these reionization possibilities on the angular power spectrum of temperature
anisotropies and polarization for simple passive isocurvature models and simple
coherent sources, observing the difference between passive and active models.
Finally, we comment on the implications of this work for more realistic active
sources, such as causal white noise and topological defect models. We show for
these models that non-standard ionization histories can shift the peak in the
CMB power to larger angular scales.Comment: 21 pages LaTeX with 11 eps figures; replaced with final version
accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Formation and Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes
The correlation between the mass of supermassive black holes in galaxy nuclei
and the mass of the galaxy spheroids or bulges (or more precisely their central
velocity dispersion), suggests a common formation scenario for galaxies and
their central black holes. The growth of bulges and black holes can commonly
proceed through external gas accretion or hierarchical mergers, and are both
related to starbursts. Internal dynamical processes control and regulate the
rate of mass accretion. Self-regulation and feedback are the key of the
correlation. It is possible that the growth of one component, either BH or
bulge, takes over, breaking the correlation, as in Narrow Line Seyfert 1
objects. The formation of supermassive black holes can begin early in the
universe, from the collapse of Population III, and then through gas accretion.
The active black holes can then play a significant role in the re-ionization of
the universe. The nuclear activity is now frequently invoked as a feedback to
star formation in galaxies, and even more spectacularly in cooling flows. The
growth of SMBH is certainly there self-regulated. SMBHs perturb their local
environment, and the mergers of binary SMBHs help to heat and destroy central
stellar cusps. The interpretation of the X-ray background yields important
constraints on the history of AGN activity and obscuration, and the census of
AGN at low and at high redshifts reveals the downsizing effect, already
observed for star formation. History appears quite different for bright QSO and
low-luminosity AGN: the first grow rapidly at high z, and their number density
decreases then sharply, while the density of low-luminosity objects peaks more
recently, and then decreases smoothly.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, review paper for Astrophysics Update
Horizontal Branch Stars: The Interplay between Observations and Theory, and Insights into the Formation of the Galaxy
We review HB stars in a broad astrophysical context, including both variable
and non-variable stars. A reassessment of the Oosterhoff dichotomy is
presented, which provides unprecedented detail regarding its origin and
systematics. We show that the Oosterhoff dichotomy and the distribution of
globular clusters (GCs) in the HB morphology-metallicity plane both exclude,
with high statistical significance, the possibility that the Galactic halo may
have formed from the accretion of dwarf galaxies resembling present-day Milky
Way satellites such as Fornax, Sagittarius, and the LMC. A rediscussion of the
second-parameter problem is presented. A technique is proposed to estimate the
HB types of extragalactic GCs on the basis of integrated far-UV photometry. The
relationship between the absolute V magnitude of the HB at the RR Lyrae level
and metallicity, as obtained on the basis of trigonometric parallax
measurements for the star RR Lyrae, is also revisited, giving a distance
modulus to the LMC of (m-M)_0 = 18.44+/-0.11. RR Lyrae period change rates are
studied. Finally, the conductive opacities used in evolutionary calculations of
low-mass stars are investigated. [ABRIDGED]Comment: 56 pages, 22 figures. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and
Space Scienc
Preconditioning Newton-Krylov Methods in Non-Convex Large Scale Optimization
We consider an iterative preconditioning technique for non-convex large scale optimization. First, we refer to the solution of large scale indefinite linear systems by using a Krylov subspace method, and describe the iterative construction of a preconditioner which does not involve matrices products or matrices storage. The set of directions generated by the Krylov subspace method is used, as by product, to provide an approximate inverse preconditioner. Then, we experience our preconditioner within Truncated Newton schemes for large scale unconstrained optimization, where we generalize the truncation rule by Nash–Sofer (Oper. Res. Lett. 9:219–221, 1990) to the indefinite case, too. We use a Krylov subspace method to both approximately solve the Newton equation and to construct the preconditioner to be used at the current outer iteration. An extensive numerical experience shows that the proposed preconditioning strategy, compared with the unpreconditioned strategy and PREQN (Morales and Nocedal in SIAM J. Optim. 10:1079–1096, 2000), may lead to a reduction of the overall inner iterations. Finally, we show that our proposal has some similarities with the Limited Memory Preconditioners (Gratton et al. in SIAM J. Optim. 21:912–935, 2011)
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