Filtering effect of cone oil droplets detected in the P-111 response spectra of japanese quail

AbstractWhile absorption spectra of bird cone visual pigments have been well studied, physiological study of bird cone cells has been less advanced owing to their small sizes. We measured the P-III components of electroretinograms (ERG) from isolated retinas of Japanese quail. We recorded responses to monochromatic flashes of equal photon numbers, and found that the shape of the response spectrum is dependent on the incident direction of the flashes. The spectrum obtained with the flashes from the cornea side had a steeper peak around 500 nm than that with flashes from the receptor side. This is clear electrophysiological evidence of the filtering effect of the oil droplets in the cone cells, which has long been suspected. We analyzed these spectra with respect to the absorption spectra of cone pigments and transmittance spectra of oil droplets

Hitomi observation of radio galaxy NGC 1275: The first X-ray microcalorimeter spectroscopy of Fe-Kα\alpha line emission from an active galactic nucleus

International audienceThe origin of the narrow Fe-Kα fluorescence line at 6.4 keV from active galactic nuclei has long been under debate; some of the possible sites are the outer accretion disk, the broad line region, a molecular torus, or interstellar/intracluster media. In 2016 February–March, we performed the first X-ray microcalorimeter spectroscopy with the Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS) on board the Hitomi satellite of the Fanaroff–Riley type I radio galaxy NGC 1275 at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies. With the high-energy resolution of ∼5 eV at 6 keV achieved by Hitomi/SXS, we detected the Fe-Kα line with ∼5.4 σ significance. The velocity width is constrained to be 500–1600 km s^−1 (FWHM for Gaussian models) at 90% confidence. The SXS also constrains the continuum level from the NGC 1275 nucleus up to ∼20 keV, giving an equivalent width of ∼20 eV for the 6.4 keV line. Because the velocity width is narrower than that of the broad Hα line of ∼2750 km s^−1, we can exclude a large contribution to the line flux from the accretion disk and the broad line region. Furthermore, we performed pixel map analyses on the Hitomi/SXS data and image analyses on the Chandra archival data, and revealed that the Fe-Kα line comes from a region within ∼1.6 kpc of the NGC 1275 core, where an active galactic nucleus emission dominates, rather than that from intracluster media. Therefore, we suggest that the source of the Fe-Kα line from NGC 1275 is likely a low-covering-fraction molecular torus or a rotating molecular disk which probably extends from a parsec to hundreds of parsecs scale in the active galactic nucleus system