2,294 research outputs found
A New Galaxy in the Local Group: the Antlia Dwarf Galaxy
We report the discovery of new member of the Local Group in the constellation
of Antlia. Optically the system appears to be a typical dwarf spheroidal galaxy
of type dE3.5 with no apparent young blue stars or unusual features. A
color-magnitude diagram in I, V-I shows the tip of the red giant branch, giving
a distance modulus of 25.3 +/- 0.2 (1.15 Mpc +/- 0.1) and a metallicity of -1.6
+/- 0.3. Although Antlia is in a relatively isolated part of the Local Group it
is only 1.2 degrees away on the sky from the Local Group dwarf NGC3109, and may
be an associated system.Comment: AJ in press, 15 pages, 7 figures, figure 2 in b/w for space saving,
full postscript version available at
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~gkth/antlia-pp.htm
Visual Search for Galaxies near the Northern Crossing of the Supergalactic plane by the Milky Way
We have visually examined twelve Palomar red Plates for galaxies at low
Galactic latitude b, where the Supergalactic Plane (SGP) is crossed by the
Galactic Plane (GP), at Galactic longitude l ~135 degrees. The catalogue
consists of 2575 galaxy candidates, of which 462 have major axis diameters d >=
0.8 arc min (uncorrected for extinction). Galaxy candidates can be identified
down to |b| ~ 0 degrees. One of our galaxy candidates (J24 = Dwingeloo 1) has
recently been discovered independently in 21cm by Kraan-Korteweg et al. (1994)
as a nearby galaxy. Comparisons with the structures seen in the IRAS and UGC
catalogues are made. We compare the success rate of identifying galaxies using
the IRAS Point Source Catalogue under different colour selection criteria. The
criteria that require both the 60 micron and 100 micron fluxes to be of high
quality, have the highest probability of selecting a galaxy (with d >= 0.6 arc
min), but at the expense of selecting a smaller number of galaxies in total.Comment: uuencoded compressed postscript, without figures. The figures are
available at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/preprint/PrePrint.htm
An Observational Limit on the Dwarf Galaxy Population of the Local Group
We present the results of an all-sky, deep optical survey for faint Local
Group dwarf galaxies. Candidate objects were selected from the second Palomar
survey (POSS-II) and ESO/SRC survey plates and follow-up observations performed
to determine whether they were indeed overlooked members of the Local Group.
Only two galaxies (Antlia and Cetus) were discovered this way out of 206
candidates. Based on internal and external comparisons, we estimate that our
visual survey is more than 77% complete for objects larger than one arc minute
in size and with a surface brightness greater than an extremely faint limit
over the 72% of the sky not obstructed by the Milky Way. Our limit of
sensitivity cannot be calculated exactly, but is certainly fainter than 25
magnitudes per square arc second in R, probably 25.5 and possibly approaching
26. We conclude that there are at most one or two Local Group dwarf galaxies
fitting our observational criteria still undiscovered in the clear part of the
sky, and a roughly a dozen hidden behind the Milky Way. Our work places the
"missing satellite problem" on a firm quantitative observational basis. We
present detailed data on all our candidates, including surface brightness
measurements.Comment: 58 pages in AJ manuscript format; some figures at slightly reduced
quality; accepted by the Astronomical Journa
The puzzlingly large Ca II triplet absorption in dwarf elliptical galaxies
We present central CaT, PaT, and CaT* indices for a sample of fifteen dwarf
elliptical galaxies (dEs). Twelve of these have CaT* ~ 7 A and extend the
negative correlation between the CaT* index and central velocity dispersion
sigma, which was derived for bright ellipticals (Es), down to 20 < sigma < 55
km/s. For five dEs we have independent age and metallicity estimates. Four of
these have CaT* ~ 7 A, much higher than expected from their low metallicities
(-1.5 < [Z/H] < -0.5). The observed anti-correlation of CaT* as a function of
sigma or Z is in flagrant disagreement with theory. We discuss some of the
amendments that have been proposed to bring the theoretical predictions into
agreement with the observed CaT*-values of bright Es and how they can be
extended to incorporate also the observed CaT*-values of dEs. Moreover, 3 dEs
in our sample have CaT* ~ 5 A, as would be expected for metal-poor stellar
systems. Any theory for dE evolution will have to be able to explain the
co-existence of low-CaT* and high-CaT* dEs at a given mean metallicity. This
could be the first direct evidence that the dE population is not homogeneous,
and that different evolutionary paths led to morphologically and kinematically
similar but chemically distinct objects.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
Financial panic and emerging market funds
This article studies equity investment of emerging-market funds based on the 2003–2009 weekly data and compares the dynamics of flow and return between tranquil period and financial panic based on the experience of the latest 2008–2009 global financial crisis. First, we find that the well-documented positive feedback trading is a tranquil-period phenomenon such that it is more difficult in general for emerging-market funds to attract new investment in financial panic. Second, the predictive power of flow on return is driven by a combination of price pressure and information effects in tranquil period, while the information effect dominates in financial panic. Third, the underlying co-movements or contagion of flow across the emerging-market funds influence the association between flow and return. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of accounting for state-dependent dynamics as well as cross-regional co-movements in the analysis of flow and return
A High Flux Source of Cold Rubidium
We report the production of a continuous, slow, and cold beam of 87-Rb atoms
with an unprecedented flux of 3.2 x 10^12 atoms/s and a temperature of a few
milliKelvin. Hot atoms are emitted from a Rb candlestick atomic beam source and
transversely cooled and collimated by a 20 cm long atomic collimator section,
augmenting overall beam flux by a factor of 50. The atomic beam is then
decelerated and longitudinally cooled by Zeeman slowing
Binarized Convolutional Neural Networks with Separable Filters for Efficient Hardware Acceleration
State-of-the-art convolutional neural networks are enormously costly in both
compute and memory, demanding massively parallel GPUs for execution. Such
networks strain the computational capabilities and energy available to embedded
and mobile processing platforms, restricting their use in many important
applications. In this paper, we push the boundaries of hardware-effective CNN
design by proposing BCNN with Separable Filters (BCNNw/SF), which applies
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on BCNN kernels to further reduce
computational and storage complexity. To enable its implementation, we provide
a closed form of the gradient over SVD to calculate the exact gradient with
respect to every binarized weight in backward propagation. We verify BCNNw/SF
on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and SVHN datasets, and implement an accelerator for
CIFAR-10 on FPGA hardware. Our BCNNw/SF accelerator realizes memory savings of
17% and execution time reduction of 31.3% compared to BCNN with only minor
accuracy sacrifices.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted for Embedded Vision Workshop (CVPRW
A short note on the joint entropy of n/2-wise independence
In this note, we prove a tight lower bound on the joint entropy of
unbiased Bernoulli random variables which are -wise independent. For
general -wise independence, we give new lower bounds by adapting Navon and
Samorodnitsky's Fourier proof of the `LP bound' on error correcting codes. This
counts as partial progress on a problem asked by Gavinsky and Pudl\'ak.Comment: 6 pages, some errors fixe
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