88 research outputs found
Radio Jet Feedback and Star Formation in Heavily Obscured Quasars at Redshifts ~0.3-3, I: ALMA Observations
We present ALMA 870 micron (345 GHz) data for 49 high redshift (0.47<z<2.85),
luminous (11.7 < log L(bol) (Lsun) < 14.2) radio-powerful AGN, obtained to
constrain cool dust emission from starbursts concurrent with highly obscured
radiative-mode black hole (BH) accretion in massive galaxies which possess a
small radio jet. The sample was selected from WISE with extremely steep (red)
mid-infrared (MIR) colors and with compact radio emission from NVSS/FIRST.
Twenty-six sources are detected at 870 microns, and we find that the sample has
large mid- to far-infrared luminosity ratios consistent with a dominant and
highly obscured quasar. The rest-frame 3 GHz radio powers are 24.7 < log P3.0
GHz (W/Hz) < 27.3, and all sources are radio-intermediate or radio-loud. BH
mass estimates are 7.7 < log M(BH) (Msun) < 10.2. The rest frame 1-5 um SEDs
are very similar to the "Hot DOGs" (Hot Dust Obscured Galaxies), and steeper
(redder) than almost any other known extragalactic sources. ISM masses
estimated for the ALMA detected sources are 9.9 < log M(ISM) (Msun) < 11.75
assuming a dust temperature of 30K. The cool dust emission is consistent with
star formation rates (SFRs) reaching several thousand Msun/yr, depending on the
assumed dust temperature, however we cannot rule out the alternative that the
AGN powers all the emission in some cases. Our best constrained source has
radiative transfer solutions with ~ equal contributions from an obscured AGN
and a young (10-15 Myr) compact starburst.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures. To appear in Astrophysical Journal. Update on
Sept 14 to correct the ALMA proposal id. to ADS/JAO.ALMA#2011.0.00397.S and
to add a missing acknowledgemen
Development of a Space-Flight ADR Providing Continuous Cooling at 50 Mk with Heat Rejection at 10 K
Future astronomical instruments will require sub-Kelvin detector temperatures to obtain high sensitivity. In many cases large arrays of detectors will be used, and the associated cooling systems will need performance surpassing the limits of present technologies. NASA is developing a compact cooling system that will lift heat continuously at temperatures below 50 mK and reject it at over 10 K. Based on Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerators (ADRs), it will have high thermodynamic efficiency and vibration-free operation with no moving parts. It will provide more than 10 times the current flight ADR cooling power at 50 mK and will also continuously cool a 4 K stage for instruments and optics. In addition, it will include an advanced magnetic shield resulting in external field variations below 5 T. We describe the cooling system here and report on the progress in its development
Assessing Coral Reef Fish Population and Community Changes in Response to Marine Reserves in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, USA
The efficacy of no-take marine reserves (NTMRs) to enhance and sustain regional coral reef fisheries was assessed in Dry Tortugas, Florida, through 9 annual fishery-independent research surveys spanning 2 years before and 10 years after NTMR implementation. A probabilistic sampling design produced precise estimates of population metrics of more than 250 exploited and non-target reef fishes. During the survey period more than 8100 research dives utilizing SCUBA Nitrox were optimally allocated using stratified random sampling. The survey domain covered 326 km2, comprised of eight reef habitats in four management areas that offered different levels of resource protection: the Tortugas North Ecological Reserve (a NTMR), Dry Tortugas National Park (recreational angling only), Dry Tortugas National Park Research Natural Area (a NTMR), and southern Tortugas Bank (open to all types of fishing). Surveys detected significant changes in population occupancy, density, and abundance within management zones for a suite of exploited and non-target species. Increases in size, adult abundance, and occupancy rates were detected for many principal exploited species in protected areas, which harbored a disproportionately greater number of adult spawning fishes. In contrast, density and occupancy rates for aquaria and non-target reef fishes fluctuated above and below baseline levels in each management zone. Observed decreases in density of exploited species below baseline levels only occurred at the Tortugas Bank area open to all fishing. Our findings indicate that these NTMRs, in conjunction with traditional fishery management control strategies, are helping to build sustainable fisheries while protecting the fundamental ecological dynamics of the Florida Keys coral-reef ecosystem
The Milky Way Tomography With SDSS. III. Stellar Kinematics
We study Milky Way kinematics using a sample of 18.8 million main-sequence stars with r 20 degrees). We find that in the region defined by 1 kpc < Z < 5 kpc and 3 kpc < R < 13 kpc, the rotational velocity for disk stars smoothly decreases, and all three components of the velocity dispersion increase, with distance from the Galactic plane. In contrast, the velocity ellipsoid for halo stars is aligned with a spherical coordinate system and appears to be spatially invariant within the probed volume. The velocity distribution of nearby (Z < 1 kpc) K/M stars is complex, and cannot be described by a standard Schwarzschild ellipsoid. For stars in a distance-limited subsample of stars (< 100 pc), we detect a multi-modal velocity distribution consistent with that seen by HIPPARCOS. This strong non-Gaussianity significantly affects the measurements of the velocity-ellipsoid tilt and vertex deviation when using the Schwarzschild approximation. We develop and test a simple descriptive model for the overall kinematic behavior that captures these features over most of the probed volume, and can be used to search for substructure in kinematic and metallicity space. We use this model to predict further improvements in kinematic mapping of the Galaxy expected from Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.NSF AST-615991, AST-0707901, AST-0551161, AST-02-38683, AST-06-07634, AST-0807444, PHY05-51164NASA NAG5-13057, NAG5-13147, NNXO-8AH83GPhysics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) PHY 08-22648U.S. National Science FoundationMarie Curie Research Training Network ELSA (European Leadership in Space Astrometry) MRTN-CT-2006-033481Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, United States Department of Energy DE-AC02-07CH11359Alfred P. Sloan FoundationParticipating InstitutionsJapanese MonbukagakushoMax Planck SocietyHigher Education Funding Council for EnglandMcDonald Observator
The Milky Way Tomography with SDSS: III. Stellar Kinematics
We study Milky Way kinematics using a sample of 18.8 million main-sequence
stars with r<20 and proper-motion measurements derived from SDSS and POSS
astrometry, including ~170,000 stars with radial-velocity measurements from the
SDSS spectroscopic survey. Distances to stars are determined using a
photometric parallax relation, covering a distance range from ~100 pc to 10 kpc
over a quarter of the sky at high Galactic latitudes (|b|>20 degrees). We find
that in the region defined by 1 kpc <Z< 5 kpc and 3 kpc <R< 13 kpc, the
rotational velocity for disk stars smoothly decreases, and all three components
of the velocity dispersion increase, with distance from the Galactic plane. In
contrast, the velocity ellipsoid for halo stars is aligned with a spherical
coordinate system and appears to be spatially invariant within the probed
volume. The velocity distribution of nearby ( kpc) K/M stars is complex,
and cannot be described by a standard Schwarzschild ellipsoid. For stars in a
distance-limited subsample of stars (<100 pc), we detect a multimodal velocity
distribution consistent with that seen by HIPPARCOS. This strong
non-Gaussianity significantly affects the measurements of the velocity
ellipsoid tilt and vertex deviation when using the Schwarzschild approximation.
We develop and test a simple descriptive model for the overall kinematic
behavior that captures these features over most of the probed volume, and can
be used to search for substructure in kinematic and metallicity space. We use
this model to predict further improvements in kinematic mapping of the Galaxy
expected from Gaia and LSST.Comment: 90 pages, 26 figures, submitted to Ap
The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER): Current Status and Performance of the First Flight
The Primordial Inflation Polarization ExploreR (PIPER) is a balloon-borne instrument optimized to measure the polarization of the CMB at large angular scales. It will map 85% of the sky over a series of conventional balloon flights from the Northern and Southern hemispheres, measuring the B-mode polarization power spectrumover a range of multipoles from 2-300 covering both the reionization bump and the recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007. PIPER will observe in four frequency bands centered at 200, 270, 350, and 600 GHz to characterize dust foregrounds. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.7 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto kilo-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 100 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematiccontrol are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs). PIPER had its engineering flight in October 2017 from Fort Sumner, New Mexico. This papers outlines the major components in the PIPER system discussing the conceptual design as well as specific choices made for PIPER. We also report on the results of the engineering flight, looking at the functionality of the payload systems, particularly VPM, as well as pointing out areas of improvement
Milky Way Tomography IV: Dissecting Dust
We use SDSS photometry of 73 million stars to simultaneously obtain best-fit
main-sequence stellar energy distribution (SED) and amount of dust extinction
along the line of sight towards each star. Using a subsample of 23 million
stars with 2MASS photometry, whose addition enables more robust results, we
show that SDSS photometry alone is sufficient to break degeneracies between
intrinsic stellar color and dust amount when the shape of extinction curve is
fixed. When using both SDSS and 2MASS photometry, the ratio of the total to
selective absorption, , can be determined with an uncertainty of about 0.1
for most stars in high-extinction regions. These fits enable detailed studies
of the dust properties and its spatial distribution, and of the stellar spatial
distribution at low Galactic latitudes. Our results are in good agreement with
the extinction normalization given by the Schlegel et al. (1998, SFD) dust maps
at high northern Galactic latitudes, but indicate that the SFD extinction map
appears to be consistently overestimated by about 20% in the southern sky, in
agreement with Schlafly et al. (2010). The constraints on the shape of the dust
extinction curve across the SDSS and 2MASS bandpasses support the models by
Fitzpatrick (1999) and Cardelli et al. (1989). For the latter, we find an
(random) (systematic) over most of the high-latitude
sky. At low Galactic latitudes (|b|<5), we demonstrate that the SFD map cannot
be reliably used to correct for extinction as most stars are embedded in dust,
rather than behind it. We introduce a method for efficient selection of
candidate red giant stars in the disk, dubbed "dusty parallax relation", which
utilizes a correlation between distance and the extinction along the line of
sight. We make these best-fit parameters, as well as all the input SDSS and
2MASS data, publicly available in a user-friendly format.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 55 pages, 37 figure
The Milky Way Tomography with SDSS: II. Stellar Metallicity
Using effective temperature and metallicity derived from SDSS spectra for
~60,000 F and G type main sequence stars (0.2<g-r<0.6), we develop polynomial
models for estimating these parameters from the SDSS u-g and g-r colors. We
apply this method to SDSS photometric data for about 2 million F/G stars and
measure the unbiased metallicity distribution for a complete volume-limited
sample of stars at distances between 500 pc and 8 kpc. The metallicity
distribution can be exquisitely modeled using two components with a spatially
varying number ratio, that correspond to disk and halo. The two components also
possess the kinematics expected for disk and halo stars. The metallicity of the
halo component is spatially invariant, while the median disk metallicity
smoothly decreases with distance from the Galactic plane from -0.6 at 500 pc to
-0.8 beyond several kpc. The absence of a correlation between metallicity and
kinematics for disk stars is in a conflict with the traditional decomposition
in terms of thin and thick disks. We detect coherent substructures in the
kinematics--metallicity space, such as the Monoceros stream, which rotates
faster than the LSR, and has a median metallicity of [Fe/H]=-0.96, with an rms
scatter of only ~0.15 dex. We extrapolate our results to the performance
expected from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and estimate that the
LSST will obtain metallicity measurements accurate to 0.2 dex or better, with
proper motion measurements accurate to ~0.2 mas/yr, for about 200 million F/G
dwarf stars within a distance limit of ~100 kpc (g<23.5). [abridged]Comment: 40 pages, 21 figures, emulateApJ style, accepted to ApJ, high
resolution figures are available from
http://www.astro.washington.edu/ivezic/sdss/mw/astroph0804.385
- ā¦