14,190 research outputs found
Calibration of the Ames Anechoic Facility. Phase 1: Short range plan
A calibration was made of the acoustic and aerodynamic characteristics of a small, open-jet wind tunnel in an anechoic room. The jet nozzle was 102 mm diameter and was operated subsonically. The anechoic-room dimensions were 7.6 m by 5.5 m by 3.4 m high (wedge tip to wedge tip). Noise contours in the chamber were determined by various jet speeds and exhaust collector positions. The optimum nozzle/collector separation from an acoustic standpoint was 2.1 m. Jet velocity profiles and turbulence levels were measured using pressure probes and hot wires. The jet was found to be symmetric, with no unusual characteristics. The turbulence measurements were hampered by oil mist contamination of the airflow
Breathing FIRE: How Stellar Feedback Drives Radial Migration, Rapid Size Fluctuations, and Population Gradients in Low-Mass Galaxies
We examine the effects of stellar feedback and bursty star formation on
low-mass galaxies ()
using the FIRE (Feedback in Realistic Environments) simulations. While previous
studies emphasized the impact of feedback on dark matter profiles, we
investigate the impact on the stellar component: kinematics, radial migration,
size evolution, and population gradients. Feedback-driven outflows/inflows
drive significant radial stellar migration over both short and long timescales
via two processes: (1) outflowing/infalling gas can remain star-forming,
producing young stars that migrate within their first , and (2) gas outflows/inflows drive strong fluctuations in the
global potential, transferring energy to all stars. These processes produce
several dramatic effects. First, galaxies' effective radii can fluctuate by
factors of over , and these rapid size fluctuations
can account for much of the observed scatter in radius at fixed
Second, the cumulative effects of many outflow/infall episodes steadily heat
stellar orbits, causing old stars to migrate outward most strongly. This
age-dependent radial migration mixes---and even inverts---intrinsic age and
metallicity gradients. Thus, the galactic-archaeology approach of calculating
radial star-formation histories from stellar populations at can be
severely biased. These effects are strongest at , the same regime where feedback most
efficiently cores galaxies. Thus, detailed measurements of stellar kinematics
in low-mass galaxies can strongly constrain feedback models and test baryonic
solutions to small-scale problems in CDM.Comment: Accepted to ApJ (820, 131) with minor revisions from v1. Figure 4 now
includes dark matter. Main results in Figures 7 and 1
Compact continuum source-finding for next generation radio surveys
We present a detailed analysis of four of the most widely used radio source
finding packages in radio astronomy, and a program being developed for the
Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. The four
packages; SExtractor, SFind, IMSAD and Selavy are shown to produce source
catalogues with high completeness and reliability. In this paper we analyse the
small fraction (~1%) of cases in which these packages do not perform well. This
small fraction of sources will be of concern for the next generation of radio
surveys which will produce many thousands of sources on a daily basis, in
particular for blind radio transients surveys. From our analysis we identify
the ways in which the underlying source finding algorithms fail. We demonstrate
a new source finding algorithm Aegean, based on the application of a Laplacian
kernel, which can avoid these problems and can produce complete and reliable
source catalogues for the next generation of radio surveys.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Radio Galaxy Zoo: Knowledge Transfer Using Rotationally Invariant Self-Organising Maps
With the advent of large scale surveys the manual analysis and classification
of individual radio source morphologies is rendered impossible as existing
approaches do not scale. The analysis of complex morphological features in the
spatial domain is a particularly important task. Here we discuss the challenges
of transferring crowdsourced labels obtained from the Radio Galaxy Zoo project
and introduce a proper transfer mechanism via quantile random forest
regression. By using parallelized rotation and flipping invariant Kohonen-maps,
image cubes of Radio Galaxy Zoo selected galaxies formed from the FIRST radio
continuum and WISE infrared all sky surveys are first projected down to a
two-dimensional embedding in an unsupervised way. This embedding can be seen as
a discretised space of shapes with the coordinates reflecting morphological
features as expressed by the automatically derived prototypes. We find that
these prototypes have reconstructed physically meaningful processes across two
channel images at radio and infrared wavelengths in an unsupervised manner. In
the second step, images are compared with those prototypes to create a
heat-map, which is the morphological fingerprint of each object and the basis
for transferring the user generated labels. These heat-maps have reduced the
feature space by a factor of 248 and are able to be used as the basis for
subsequent ML methods. Using an ensemble of decision trees we achieve upwards
of 85.7% and 80.7% accuracy when predicting the number of components and peaks
in an image, respectively, using these heat-maps. We also question the
currently used discrete classification schema and introduce a continuous scale
that better reflects the uncertainty in transition between two classes, caused
by sensitivity and resolution limits
Growth of binary organic NLO crystals: m.NA-p.NA and m.NA-CNA system
Experiments were carried out to grow 3.Nitroaniline (m.NA) crystals doped with 4.Nitroaniline (p.NA) and 2.chloro 4.Nitroaniline (CNA). The measured undercooling for m.NA, p.NA, and CNA were 0.21 tm K, 0.23 tm K, and 0.35 tm K respectively, where tm represents the melting temperature of the pure component. Because of the crystals' large heat of fusion and large undercooling, it was not possible to grow good quality crystals with low thermal gradients. In the conventional two-zone Bridgman furnace we had to raise the temperature of the hot zone above the decomposition temperature of CNA, p.NA, and m.NA to achieve the desired thermal gradient. To avoid decomposition, we used an unconventional Bridgman furnace. Two immiscible liquids, silicone oil and ethylene glycol, were used to build a special two-zone Bridgman furnace. A temperature gradient of 18 K/cm was achieved without exceeding the decomposition temperature of the crystal. The binary crystals, m.NA-p.NA and m.NA-CNA, were grown in centimeter size in this furnace. X-ray and optical characterization showed good optical quality
Deitsch, Däätsch, Düütsch and Dietsch: The Varieties of Kansas German Dialects after 150 Years of German Group Settlement in Kansas
This is the published version, made available with permission of the editor
The Mid-IR and X-ray Selected QSO Luminosity Function
We present the J-band luminosity function of 1838 mid-infrared and X-ray
selected AGNs in the redshift range 0<z<5.85. These luminosity functions are
constructed by combining the deep multi-wavelength broad-band observations from
the UV to the mid-IR of the NDWFS Bootes field with the X-ray observations of
the XBootes survey and the spectroscopic observations of the same field by
AGES. Our sample is primarily composed of IRAC-selected AGNs, targeted using
modifications of the Stern et al.(2005) criteria, complemented by MIPS 24
microns and X-ray selected AGNs to alleviate the biases of IRAC mid-IR
selection against z~4.5 quasars and AGNs faint with respect to their hosts.
This sample provides an accurate link between low and high redshift AGN
luminosity functions and does not suffer from the usual incompleteness of
optical samples at z~3. We find that the space density of the brightest quasars
strongly decreases from z=3 to z=0, while the space density of faint quasars is
at least flat, and possibly increasing, over the same redshift range. At z>3 we
observe a decrease in the space density of quasars of all brightnesses. We
model the luminosity function by a double power-law and find that its evolution
cannot be described by either pure luminosity or pure density evolution, but
must be a combination of both. Our best-fit model has bright and faint
power-law indices consistent with the low redshift measurements based on the
2QZ and 2SLAQ surveys and it generally agrees with the number of bright quasars
predicted by other LFs at all redshifts. If we construct the QSO luminosity
function using only the IRAC-selected AGNs, we find that the biases inherent to
this selection method significantly modify the behavior of phi*(z) only for z<1
and have no significant impact upon the characteristic magnitude M*_J(z).Comment: Corrected minor typo in equations (4) and (6). Accepted for
publication in The Astrophysical Journal. 56 pages + 6 tables + 16 figure
High-resolution VLA Imaging of SDSS Stripe 82 at 1.4 GHz
We present a high-resolution radio survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) Southern Equatorial Stripe, a.k.a. Stripe 82. This 1.4 GHz survey was
conducted with the Very Large Array (VLA) primarily in the A-configuration,
with supplemental B-configuration data to increase sensitivity to extended
structure. The survey has an angular resolution of 1.8" and achieves a median
rms noise of 52 microJy/bm over 92 deg^2. This is the deepest 1.4 GHz survey to
achieve this large of an area, filling a gap in the phase space between small,
deep and large, shallow surveys. It also serves as a pilot project for a larger
high-resolution survey with the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). We discuss
the technical design of the survey and details of the observations, and we
outline our method for data reduction. We present a catalog of 17,969 isolated
radio components, for an overall source density of ~195 sources/deg^2. The
astrometric accuracy of the data is excellent, with an internal check utilizing
multiply-observed sources yielding an rms scatter of 0.19" in both right
ascension and declination. A comparison to the SDSS DR7 Quasar Catalog further
confirms that the astrometry is well tied to the optical reference frame, with
mean offsets of 0.02" +/- 0.01" in right ascension, and 0.01" +/- 0.02" in
declination. A check of our photometry reveals a small, negative CLEAN-like
bias on the level of 35 microJy. We report on the catalog completeness, finding
that 97% of FIRST-detected quasars are recovered in the new Stripe 82 radio
catalog, while faint, extended sources are more likely to be resolved out by
the resolution bias. We conclude with a discussion of the optical counterparts
to the catalog sources, including 76 newly-detected radio quasars. The full
catalog as well as a search page and cutout server are available online at
http://third.ucllnl.org/cgi-bin/stripe82cutout.Comment: 18 pages, 22, figures. Submitted to AJ, revised to address referee's
comment
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