Local Interstellar Medium Kinematics towards the Southern Coalsack and Chamaeleon-Musca dark clouds

The results of a spectroscopic programme aiming to investigate the kinematics of the local interstellar medium components towards the Southern Coalsack and Chamaeleon-Musca dark clouds are presented. The analysis is based upon high-resolution (R ~ 60,000) spectra of the insterstellar NaI D absorption lines towards 63 B-type stars (d < 500 pc) selected to cover these clouds and the connecting area defined by the Galactic coordinates: 308 > l > 294 and -22 < b < 5. The radial velocities, column densities, velocity dispersions, colour excess and photometric distances to the stars are used to understand the kinematics and distribution of the interstellar cloud components. The analysis indicates that the interstellar gas is distributed in two extended sheet-like structures permeating the whole area, one at d < 60 pc and another around 120-150 pc from the Sun. The dust and gas feature around 120-150 pc seem to be part of an extended large scale feature of similar kinematic properties, supposedly identified with the interaction zone of the Local and Loop I bubbles.Comment: 19 pages, accepted for MNRA

Radiation effects on silicon Final report, Jun. 1, 1964 - May 31, 1965

Radiation effects on silicon - degradation of carrier lifetime in N and P type silicon samples exposed to 30 MeV electron irradiatio

The harmonic power spectrum of the soft X-ray background I. The data analysis

Fluctuations of the soft X-ray background are investigated using harmonic analysis. A section of the ROSAT All-Sky Survey around the north galactic pole is used. The flux distribution is expanded into a set of harmonic functions and the power spectrum is determined. Several subsamples of the RASS have been used and the spectra for different regions and energies are presented. The effects of the data binning in pixels are assessed and taken into account. The spectra of the analyzed samples reflect both small scale effects generated by strong discrete sources and the large scale gradients of the XRB distribution. Our results show that the power spectrum technique can be effectively used to investigate anisotropy of the XRB at various scales. This statistics will become a useful tool in the investigation of various XRB components.Comment: 12 pages, A&A accepte

Probing the structure of the cold dark matter halo with ancient mica

Mica can store (for >1 Gy) etchable tracks caused by atoms recoiling from WIMPs. Ancient mica is a directional detector despite the complex motions it makes with respect to the WIMP "wind". We can exploit the properties of directionality and long integration time to probe for structure in the dark matter halo of our galaxy. We compute a sample of possible signals in mica for a plausible model of halo structure.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Missing baryons and the soft X-ray background

The X-ray background intensity around Lick count galaxies and rich clusters of galaxies is investigated in three ROSAT energy bands. It is found that the X-ray enhancements surrounding concentrations of galaxies exhibit significantly softer spectrum than the standard cluster emission and the average extragalactic background. The diffuse soft emission accompanying the galaxies is consistent with the thermal emission of the hot gas postulated first by the Cen & Ostriker hydrodynamic simulations. Our estimates of the gas temperature - although subject to large uncertainties - averaged over several Mpc scales are below 1 keV, which is substantially below the temperature of the intra-cluster gas, but consistent with temperatures predicted for the local intergalactic medium. It is pointed out that the planned ROSITA mission would be essential for our understanding of the diffuse thermal component of the background.Comment: AA accepted, 6 pages, incl. 4 figure

Radiation effects on silicon second quarterly progress report, sep. 1 - nov. 30, 1964

Electron spin resonance measurements on P-doped silicon - vacancy phosphorus defec

The XMM-Newton EPIC Background and the production of Background Blank Sky Event Files

We describe in detail the nature of XMM-Newton EPIC background and its various complex components, summarising the new findings of the XMM-Newton EPIC background working group, and provide XMM-Newton background blank sky event files for use in the data analysis of diffuse and extended sources. Blank sky event file data sets are produced from the stacking of data, taken from 189 observations resulting from the Second XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue (2XMMp) reprocessing. The data underwent several filtering steps, using a revised and improved method over previous work, which we describe in detail. We investigate several properties of the final blank sky data sets. The user is directed to the location of the final data sets. There is a final data set for each EPIC instrument-filter-mode combination.Comment: Paper accepted by A&A 22 December 2006. 14 pages, 8 figures. Paper can also be found at http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~jac48/publications

Radiation effects on silicon third quarterly progress report, dec. 1, 1964 - feb. 28, 1965

Radiation effect on silicon - introduction rates of vacancy-phosphorus defect and divacancy in p-type material for solar cell applicatio

Comments on "Limits on Dark Matter Using Ancient Mica"

To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. together with the author's Reply.Comment: Compressed PostScript (filename.ps.Z), 3 pages, no figure

OMCat: Catalogue of Serendipitous Sources Detected with the XMM-Newton Optical Monitor

The Optical Monitor Catalogue of serendipitous sources (OMCat) contains entries for every source detected in the publicly available XMM-Newton Optical Monitor (OM) images taken in either the imaging or ``fast'' modes. Since the OM is coaligned and records data simultaneously with the X-ray telescopes on XMM-Newton, it typically produces images in one or more near-UV/optical bands for every pointing of the observatory. As of the beginning of 2006, the public archive had covered roughly 0.5% of the sky in 2950 fields. The OMCat is not dominated by sources previously undetected at other wavelengths; the bulk of objects have optical counterparts. However, the OMCat can be used to extend optical or X-ray spectral energy distributions for known objects into the ultraviolet, to study at higher angular resolution objects detected with GALEX, or to find high-Galactic-latitude objects of interest for UV spectroscopy.Comment: 25 pages, 22 figures, submitted to PAS