14,901 research outputs found
CDM analysis
The C Data Manager (CDM) is an advanced tool for creating an object-oriented database and for processing queries related to objects stored in that database. The CDM source code was purchased and will be modified over the course of the Arachnid project. In this report, the modified CDM is referred to as MCDM. Using MCDM, a detailed series of experiments was designed and conducted on a Sun Sparcstation. The primary results and analysis of the CDM experiment are provided in this report. The experiments involved creating the Long-form Faint Source Catalog (LFSC) database and then analyzing it with respect to following: (1) the relationships between the volume of data and the time required to create a database; (2) the storage requirements of the database files; and (3) the properties of query algorithms. The effort focused on defining, implementing, and analyzing seven experimental scenarios: (1) find all sources by right ascension--RA; (2) find all sources by declination--DEC; (3) find all sources in the right ascension interval--RA1, RA2; (4) find all sources in the declination interval--DEC1, DEC2; (5) find all sources in the rectangle defined by--RA1, RA2, DEC1, DEC2; (6) find all sources that meet certain compound conditions; and (7) analyze a variety of query algorithms. Throughout this document, the numerical results obtained from these scenarios are reported; conclusions are presented at the end of the document
High temperature measuring device
Ultrasonic pulse technique for measuring average gas temperature in nuclear rocket engine - sound propagation and environmental studie
Flows, Fragmentation, and Star Formation. I. Low-mass Stars in Taurus
The remarkably filamentary spatial distribution of young stars in the Taurus
molecular cloud has significant implications for understanding low-mass star
formation in relatively quiescent conditions. The large scale and regular
spacing of the filaments suggests that small-scale turbulence is of limited
importance, which could be consistent with driving on large scales by flows
which produced the cloud. The small spatial dispersion of stars from gaseous
filaments indicates that the low-mass stars are generally born with small
velocity dispersions relative to their natal gas, of order the sound speed or
less. The spatial distribution of the stars exhibits a mean separation of about
0.25 pc, comparable to the estimated Jeans length in the densest gaseous
filaments, and is consistent with roughly uniform density along the filaments.
The efficiency of star formation in filaments is much higher than elsewhere,
with an associated higher frequency of protostars and accreting T Tauri stars.
The protostellar cores generally are aligned with the filaments, suggesting
that they are produced by gravitational fragmentation, resulting in initially
quasi-prolate cores. Given the absence of massive stars which could strongly
dominate cloud dynamics, Taurus provides important tests of theories of
dispersed low-mass star formation and numerical simulations of molecular cloud
structure and evolution.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures: to appear in Ap
Research on the design of adaptive control systems, volume 1 Final report
Adaptive control systems - combined optimization and adaptive control, analysis-synthesis and passive adaptive systems, learning systems, and measurement adaptive system
Optimization study of high power static inverters and converters Final report
Optimization study and basic performance characteristics for conceptual designs for high power static inverter
Turbulent Cooling Flows in Molecular Clouds
We propose that inward, subsonic flows arise from the local dissipation of
turbulent motions in molecular clouds. Such "turbulent cooling flows" may
account for recent observations of spatially extended inward motions towards
dense cores. These pressure-driven flows may arise from various types of
turbulence and dissipation mechanisms. For the example of MHD waves and
turbulence damped by ion-neutral friction, sustained cooling flow requires that
the outer gas be sufficiently turbulent, that the inner gas have marginal
field-neutral coupling, and that this coupling decrease sufficiently rapidly
with increasing density. These conditions are most likely met at the transition
between outer regions ionized primarily by UV photons and inner regions ionized
primarily by cosmic rays. If so, turbulent cooling flows can help form dense
cores, with speeds faster than expected for ambipolar diffusion. Such motions
could reduce the time needed for dense core formation and could precede and
enhance the motions of star-forming gravitational infall.Comment: To appear ApJL, Nov.10, 4 ApJ style pages, Postscrip
Heliospheric plasma sheets
[1] As a high-beta feature on scales of hours or less, the heliospheric plasma sheet (HPS) encasing the heliospheric current sheet shows a high degree of variability. A study of 52 sector boundaries identified in electron pitch angle spectrograms in Wind data from 1995 reveals that only half concur with both high-beta plasma and current sheets, as required for an HPS. The remaining half lack either a plasma sheet or current sheet or both. A complementary study of 37 high-beta events reveals that only 5 contain sector boundaries while nearly all (34) contain local magnetic field reversals, however brief. We conclude that high-beta plasma sheets surround current sheets but that most of these current sheets are associated with fields turned back on themselves. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that high-beta plasma sheets, both at and away from sector boundaries, are the heliospheric counterparts of the small coronal transients observed at the tips of helmet streamers, in which case the proposed mechanism for their release, interchange reconnection, could be responsible for the field inversions
Contribution of brown dwarfs and white dwarfs to recent microlensing observations and to the halo mass budget
We examine the recent results of the MACHO collaboration towards the Large
Magellanic Cloud (Alcock et al. 1996) in terms of a halo brown dwarf or white
dwarf population. The possibility for most of the microlensing events to be due
to brown dwarfs is totally excluded by large-scale kinematic properties. The
white dwarf scenario is examined in details in the context of the most recent
white dwarf cooling theory (Segretain et al. 1994) which includes explicitely
the extra source of energy due to carbon-oxygen differentiation at
crystallization, and the subsequent Debye cooling. We show that the
observational constraints arising from the luminosity function of high-velocity
white dwarfs in the solar neighborhood and from the recent HST deep field
counts are consistent with a white dwarf contribution to the halo missing mass
as large as 50 %, provided i) an IMF strongly peaked around 1.7 Msol and ii) a
halo age older than 18 Gyr.Comment: 14 pages, 2 Postscript figures, to be published in Astrophysical
Journal Letters, minor revision in tex
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