101 research outputs found
Relativistic cross sections of mass stripping and tidal disruption of a star by a super-massive rotating black hole
[abbreviated] We consider the problem of tidal disruption of a star by a
super-massive Kerr black hole. Using a numerically fast Lagrangian model of the
tidally disrupted star we survey the parameter space of the problem and find
the regions in the parameter space where the total disruption of the star or a
partial mass loss take place as a result of fly-by around the black hole. Our
treatment is based on General Relativity, and we consider the range of the
black hole masses where the tidal disruption competes with the relativistic
effect of direct capture of the star by the black hole. We find that our
results can be represented on the plane of specific orbital angular momenta of
the star . We calculate the contours of a given mass
loss of the star on this plane, referred to as the tidal cross sections, for a
given black hole mass , rotational parameter and inclination of the
trajectory of the star with respect to the black hole equatorial plane. It is
shown that the tidal cross sections can be approximated as circles symmetric
above the axis , and shifted with respect to the origin of the
coordinates in direction of negative . The radii and shifts of
these circles are obtained numerically for the black hole masses in the range
and different values of . It is
shown that when the tidal disruption takes place for and when the tidal disruption is possible for .Comment: 11 pages, 16 figures, A&A in press, the text is clarified, the title
and the abstract shown in text are change
Potassium secretion by the descending limb or pars recta of the juxtamedullary nephron in vivo
Potassium secretion by the descending limb or pars recta of the juxtamedullary nephron in vivo. Potassium reabsorption by the juxtamedullary nephron up to the hairpin turn was studied by the micropuncture technique in the exposed renal papilla of rats. In 18 nondiuretic rats, the fraction of filtered potassium remaining at the end of the desdending limb averaged 113 ± 9%, indicating either that potassium is not reabsorbed by the juxtamedullary proximal tubule and descending limb or that potassium is reabsorbed and secreted in those segments. Furosemide, a drug which inhibits NaCl reabsorption in the ascending limb downstream from the descending limb, significantly decreased the potassium remaining at the end of the descending limb from 106 ± 12 to 72 ± 11% in seven rats. Benzolamide, a drug which inhibits reabsorption of NaHCO3 and water in the proximal tubule upstream from the descending limb, significantly increased the potassium remaining from 103 ± 13 to 177 ± 32% in eight rats. These findings support the hypothesis that in the rat, potassium is normally reabsorbed by the proximal convoluted tubule and secreted in the pars recta or descending limb of the juxtamedullary nephron
Morphometric evaluation of brain infarcts in rats and gerbils
The Levine rat prepartion, the gerbil stroke model, and appropriate control animals were used to determine if the 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) would selectively identify noninfarcted versus infarcted cerebral tissue. The TTC is frequently used to quantify infarcted myocardial tissue and has been shown to have great specificity, reproducibility, and efficacy. The TTC produces a red product upon reaction with the respiratory enzymes (dehydrogenases) present in non-infarcted tissues. Irreversibly damaged tissues, lacking dehydrogenases, do not form red reaction products. Six gerbil brains and seven rat brains were incubated with the TTC, and the unreacted areas were macroscopically identified. The brains were fixed and sectioned for routine hematoxylin and eosin staining to determine the specificity of the TTC. The TTC was found to react selectively only with non-infarcted cerebral tissue. The gross brain sections were evaluated by macroscopic morphometric analysis, and the unreacted area was always ipsilateral to ligation and correlated with histologic identification of infarct. The brains from neurologically intact animals demonstrated neither macroscopic nor histological evidence of infarction. This technique allows macroscopic quantification of infarct size by planimetry. The average area of infarct for the neurologically impaired rats was 34.7% and it was 31.4% for the impaired gerbils. The percentage of surface area of each infarcted slice was found to correlate with the severity of the neurologic deficit. We conclude that the TTC staining is effective for macroscopically delineating cerebral infarcts in rats and gerbils, thus permitting quantification of infarct size.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25989/1/0000055.pd
The tidal disruption rate in dense galactic cusps containing a supermassive binary black hole
We consider the problem of tidal disruption of stars in the centre of a
galaxy containing a supermassive binary black hole with unequal masses. We
assume that over the separation distance between the black holes the
gravitational potential is dominated by the more massive black hole. Also, we
assume that the number density of stars is concentric with the primary black
hole and has a power law cusp.We show that the bulk of stars with a small
angular-momentum component normal to the black hole binary orbit can reach a
small value of total angular momentum through secular evolution in the
gravitational field of the binary, and hence they can be tidally disrupted.
This effect is analogous to the so-called Kozai effect (Kozai, 1962, Lidov,
1961,1962) well known in celestial mechanics. We develop an analytical theory
of secular evolution of the stellar orbits and calculate the rate of tidal
disruption. We confront our analytical theory with a simple numerical model and
find very good agreement.
Our results show that for primary black-hole mass \sim
10^{6}-10^{7}M_{\odot}, the black- hole mass ratio q > 10^{-2}, cusp size \sim
1pc, the tidal disruption rate can be as large as \sim 10^{-2}-1M_{\odot}/yr.
This is at least 10^{2}-10^{4} times larger than estimated for the case of a
single supermassive black hole. The duration of the phase of enhanced tidal
disruption is determined by the dynamical friction time scale, and it is rather
short: \sim 10^{5}yr. The dependence of the tidal disruption rate on the mass
ratio, as well as on the size of the cusp, is also discussed.Comment: This version has been published in MNRA
When who and how matter: explaining the success of referendums in Europe
This article aims to identify the institutional factors that make a referendum successful. This comparative analysis seeks to explain the success of top-down referendums organized in Europe between 2001 and 2013. It argues and tests for the main effect of three institutional factors (popularity of the initiator, size of parliamentary majority, and political cues during referendum campaigns) and controls for the type of referendum and voter turnout. The analysis uses data collected from referendums and electoral databases, public opinion surveys, and newspaper articles. Results show that referendums proposed by a large parliamentary majority or with clear messages from political parties during campaign are likely to be successful
The First Measurements of Galaxy Clustering from IRAC Data of the Spitzer First Look Survey
We present the first results of the angular auto-correlation function of the
galaxies detected by the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) instrument in the First
Look Survey (FLS) of the Spitzer Space Telescope. We detect significant signals
of galaxy clustering within the survey area. The angular auto-correlation
function of the galaxies detected in each of the four IRAC instrument channels
is consistent with a power-law form out to
\theta = 0.2\arcdeg, with the slope ranging from to 1.8. We
estimate the correlation amplitudes to be , , , and at
\theta=1\arcdeg for galaxies detected in the IRAC 3.6m, 4.5m,
5.8m, and 8.0m instrument channels, respectively. We compare our
measurements at 3.6m with the previous K-band measurements, and discuss
the implications of these results.Comment: Accepted for publication in the ApJ Supplements Spitzer Special
Issue; 12 pages including 3 figures and 1 tabl
LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint
magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science
opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field
of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over
20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with
fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a
total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic
parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book
discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a
broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and
outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,
the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local
Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the
properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then
turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to
z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and
baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to
constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo
Galaxy bulges and their massive black holes: a review
With references to both key and oft-forgotten pioneering works, this article
starts by presenting a review into how we came to believe in the existence of
massive black holes at the centres of galaxies. It then presents the historical
development of the near-linear (black hole)-(host spheroid) mass relation,
before explaining why this has recently been dramatically revised. Past
disagreement over the slope of the (black hole)-(velocity dispersion) relation
is also explained, and the discovery of sub-structure within the (black
hole)-(velocity dispersion) diagram is discussed. As the search for the
fundamental connection between massive black holes and their host galaxies
continues, the competing array of additional black hole mass scaling relations
for samples of predominantly inactive galaxies are presented.Comment: Invited (15 Feb. 2014) review article (submitted 16 Nov. 2014). 590
references, 9 figures, 25 pages in emulateApJ format. To appear in "Galactic
Bulges", E. Laurikainen, R.F. Peletier, and D.A. Gadotti (eds.), Springer
Publishin
Many Labs 5:Testing pre-data collection peer review as an intervention to increase replicability
Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect (p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate the original effects. We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replication studies. We administered the RP:P and revised protocols in multiple laboratories (median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5, range = 3?9; median total sample = 1,279.5, range = 276?3,512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, following the preregistered analysis plan, we found that the revised protocols produced effect sizes similar to those of the RP:P protocols (?r = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for the revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to that of the RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than that of the original studies (r = .37). Analysis of the cumulative evidence across the original studies and the corresponding three replication attempts provided very precise estimates of the 10 tested effects and indicated that their effect sizes (median r = .07, range = .00?.15) were 78% smaller, on average, than the original effect sizes (median r = .37, range = .19?.50)
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
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