3,421 research outputs found
Impact of an AGN featureless continuum on estimation of stellar population properties
The effect of the featureless power-law (PL) continuum of an active galactic
nucleus (AGN) on the estimation of physical properties of galaxies with optical
population spectral synthesis (PSS) remains largely unknown. With this in mind,
we fit synthetic galaxy spectra representing a wide range of galaxy star
formation histories (SFHs) and including distinct PL contributions of the form
with the PSS code STARLIGHT to study to which
extent various inferred quantities (e.g. stellar mass, mean age, and mean
metallicity) match the input. The synthetic spectral energy distributions
(SEDs) computed with our evolutionary spectral synthesis code include an AGN PL
component with and a fractional contribution to the monochromatic flux at 4020 \AA. At the
empirical AGN detection threshold that we
previously inferred in a pilot study on this subject, our results show that the
neglect of a PL component in spectral fitting can lead to an overestimation by
2 dex in stellar mass and by up to 1 and 4 dex in the light-
and mass-weighted mean stellar age, respectively, whereas the light- and
mass-weighted mean stellar metallicity are underestimated by up to 0.3
and 0.6 dex, respectively. Other fitting set-ups including either a
single PL or multiple PLs in the base reveal, on average, much lower
unsystematic uncertainties of the order of those typically found when fitting
purely stellar SEDs with stellar templates, however, reaching locally up to
1, 3 and 0.4 dex in mass, age and metallicity, respectively. Our results
underscore the importance of an accurate modelling of the AGN spectral
contribution in PSS fits as a minimum requirement for the recovery of the
physical and evolutionary properties of stellar populations in active galaxies.Comment: 18 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in A&
Interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin FEM for the -Laplacian
In this paper we construct an "Interior Penalty" Discontinuous Galerkin
method to approximate the minimizer of a variational problem related to the
Laplacian. The function is log H\"{o}lder
continuous and . We prove that the minimizers of the
discrete functional converge to the solution. We also make some numerical
experiments in dimension one to compare this method with the Conforming
Galerkin Method, in the case where is close to one. This example is
motivated by its applications to image processing.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure
Self-consistent physical parameters for MC clusters from CMD modelling: application to SMC clusters observed with the SOAR telescope
The Magellanic Clouds (MCs) present a rich system of stellar clusters that
can be used to probe the dynamical and chemical evolution of these neighboring
and interacting irregular galaxies. In particular, these stellar clusters (SCs)
present combinations of age and metallicity that are not found for this class
of objects in the Milky Way, being therefore very useful templates to test and
to calibrate integrated light simple stellar population (SSP) models applied to
unresolved distance galaxies. On its turn, the age and metallicity for a
cluster can be determined spatially resolving its stars, by means of analysis
of its colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs). In this work we present our method to
determine self-consistent physical parameters (age, metallicity, distance
modulus and reddening) for a stellar cluster, from CMDs modelling of relatively
unstudied SCs in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) imaged in the BVI filters
with the 4.1 m SOAR telescope. Our preliminary results confirm our expectations
that come from a previous integrated spectra and colour analysis: at least one
of them (Lindsay 2) is an intermediate-age stellar cluster with ~ 2.6 Gyr and
[Fe/H] ~ -1.3, being therefore a new interesting witness regarding the
reactivation of the star formation in the MCs in the last 4 Gyr.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To be published in the proceedings of IAUS256:
The Magellanic System: Stars, Gas, and Galaxie
Stripe-tetragonal phase transition in the 2D Ising model with dipole interactions: Partition-function zeros approach
We have performed multicanonical simulations to study the critical behavior
of the two-dimensional Ising model with dipole interactions. This study
concerns the thermodynamic phase transitions in the range of the interaction
\delta where the phase characterized by striped configurations of width h=1 is
observed. Controversial results obtained from local update algorithms have been
reported for this region, including the claimed existence of a second-order
phase transition line that becomes first order above a tricritical point
located somewhere between \delta=0.85 and 1. Our analysis relies on the complex
partition function zeros obtained with high statistics from multicanonical
simulations. Finite size scaling relations for the leading partition function
zeros yield critical exponents \nu that are clearly consistent with a single
second-order phase transition line, thus excluding such tricritical point in
that region of the phase diagram. This conclusion is further supported by
analysis of the specific heat and susceptibility of the orientational order
parameter.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev.
A Lightweight Regression Method to Infer Psycholinguistic Properties for Brazilian Portuguese
Psycholinguistic properties of words have been used in various approaches to
Natural Language Processing tasks, such as text simplification and readability
assessment. Most of these properties are subjective, involving costly and
time-consuming surveys to be gathered. Recent approaches use the limited
datasets of psycholinguistic properties to extend them automatically to large
lexicons. However, some of the resources used by such approaches are not
available to most languages. This study presents a method to infer
psycholinguistic properties for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using regressors
built with a light set of features usually available for less resourced
languages: word length, frequency lists, lexical databases composed of school
dictionaries and word embedding models. The correlations between the properties
inferred are close to those obtained by related works. The resulting resource
contains 26,874 words in BP annotated with concreteness, age of acquisition,
imageability and subjective frequency.Comment: Paper accepted for TSD201
Constraining the neutrino magnetic dipole moment from white dwarf pulsations
Pulsating white dwarf stars can be used as astrophysical laboratories to
constrain the properties of weakly interacting particles. Comparing the cooling
rates of these stars with the expected values from theoretical models allows us
to search for additional sources of cooling due to the emission of axions,
neutralinos, or neutrinos with magnetic dipole moment. In this work, we derive
an upper bound to the neutrino magnetic dipole moment using an estimate of the
rate of period change of the pulsating DB white dwarf star PG 1351+489. By
comparing the theoretical rate of change of period expected for this star with
the rate of change of period with time of PG 1351+489, we assess the possible
existence of additional cooling by neutrinos with magnetic dipole moment. Our
models suggest the existence of some additional cooling in this pulsating DB
white dwarf, consistent with a non-zero magnetic dipole moment. Our upper limit
for the neutrino magnetic dipole moment is somewhat less restrictive than, but
still compatible with, other limits inferred from the white dwarf luminosity
function or from the color-magnitude diagram of the Globular cluster M5.
Further improvements of the measurement of the rate of period change of the
dominant pulsation mode of PG 1351+489 will be necessary to confirm our bound.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in Journal
of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physic
Dimensionality effects in the LDOS of ferromagnetic hosts probed via STM: spin-polarized quantum beats and spin filtering
We theoretically investigate the local density of states (LDOS) probed by a
STM tip of ferromagnetic metals hosting a single adatom and a subsurface
impurity. We model the system via the two-impurity Anderson Hamiltonian. By
using the equation of motion with the relevant Green functions, we derive
analytical expressions for the LDOS of two host types: a surface and a quantum
wire. The LDOS reveals Friedel-like oscillations and Fano interference as a
function of the STM tip position. These oscillations strongly depend on the
host dimension. Interestingly, we find that the spin-dependent Fermi wave
numbers of the hosts give rise to spin-polarized quantum beats in the LDOS.
While the LDOS for the metallic surface shows a damped beating pattern, it
exhibits an opposite behavior in the quantum wire. Due to this absence of
damping, the wire operates as a spatially resolved spin filter with a high
efficiency.Comment: revised tex
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