8,144 research outputs found
Keeping the dream alive: Managing the Space Station Program, 1982 to 1986
The management is described and analyzed of the formative years of the NASA Space Station Program (1982 to 1986), beginning with the successful initiative for program approval by Administrator James M. Beggs through to the decision to bring program management to Reston, Virginia. Emphasis is on internal management issues related to the implementation of the various phases of the program. Themes examined are the problem of bringing programmatic and institutional interests together and focusing them to forward the program; centralized versus decentralized control of the program; how the history of NASA and of the individual installations affected the decisions made; and the pressure from those outside NASA. The four sections are: (1) the decision to build the space station, (2) the design of the management experiment, (3) the experiment comes to life, and (4) the decision reversal
Cryogenic Dielectrics and HTS Power Apparatus: Research at the University of Southampton
The Nature of the Giant Outbursts in the Bursting Pulsar GRO J 1744-28
We investigate the possible role of an accretion disk instability in
producing the giant outbursts seen in GRO J1744-28. Specifically, we study the
global, time dependent evolution of the Lightman-Eardley instability which can
develop near the inner edge of an accretion disk when the radiation pressure
becomes comparable to the gas pressure. Broadly speaking, our results are
compatible with earlier works by Taam \& Lin and by Lasota \& Pelat. The
uniqueness of GRO J1744-28 appears to be associated with the constraint that,
in order for outbursts to occur, the rate of accretion at the inner edge must
be within a narrow range just above the critical accretion rate at which
radiation pressure is beginning to become significant.Comment: 11 pages in .tex file, 4 Postscript figures, .tex file uses
aasms.sty; Ap. J. L. 1996, in pres
Analytical pair correlations in ideal quantum gases: Temperature-dependent bunching and antibunching
The fluctuation-dissipation theorem together with the exact density response
spectrum for ideal quantum gases has been utilized to yield a new expression
for the static structure factor, which we use to derive exact analytical
expressions for the temperature{dependent pair distribution function g(r) of
the ideal gases. The plots of bosonic and fermionic g(r) display "Bose pile"
and "Fermi hole" typically akin to bunching and antibunching as observed
experimentally for ultracold atomic gases. The behavior of spin-scaled pair
correlation for fermions is almost featureless but bosons show a rich structure
including long-range correlations near T_c. The coherent state at T=0 shows no
correlation at all, just like single-mode lasers. The depicted decreasing trend
in correlation with decrease in temperature for T < T_c should be observable in
accurate experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, minor revisio
The Burst Spectra of EXO 0748-676 during a Long 2003 XMM-Newton Observation
Gravitationally redshifted absorption lines from highly ionized iron have
been previously identified in the burst spectra of the neutron star in EXO
0748-676. To repeat this detection we obtained a long, nearly 600 ks
observation of the source with XMM-Newton in 2003. The spectral features seen
in the burst spectra from the initial data are not reproduced in the burst
spectra from this new data. In this paper we present the spectra from the 2003
observations and discuss the sensitivity of the absorption structure to changes
in the photospheric conditions.Comment: 18 Pages, 3 Figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
Recommended from our members
Gatekeeping Twitter: Message diffusion in political hashtags
This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine variables of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative scenario to the dominant view regarding gatekeeping in Twitter political hashtags. Instead of depending on hubs that act as gatekeepers, we found that the intense activity of individuals with relatively few connections is capable of generating highly replicated messages that contributed to Trending Topics without relying on the activity of user hubs. The results support the thesis of social consensus through the influence of committed minorities, which states that a prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction of randomly distributed committed agents
Constraining Alternate Models of Black Holes: Type I X-ray Bursts on Accreting Fermion-Fermion and Boson-Fermion Stars
The existence of black holes remains open to doubt until other conceivable
options are excluded. With this motivation, we consider a model of a compact
star in which most of the mass consists of dark particles of some kind, and a
small fraction of the mass is in the form of ordinary nucleonic gas. The gas
does not interact with the dark matter other than via gravity, but collects at
the center as a separate fermionic fluid component. Depending on whether the
dark mass is made of fermions or bosons, the objects may be called
fermion-fermion stars or boson-fermion stars, respectively. For appropriate
choices of the mass of the dark matter particles, these objects are viable
models of black hole candidates in X-ray binaries. We consider models with a
dark mass of 10 solar masses and a range of gas mass from 10^{-6} to nearly one
solar mass, and analyse the bursting properties of the models when they accrete
gas. We show that all the models would experience thermonuclear Type I X-ray
bursts at appropriate mass accretion rates. Since no Type I bursts have been
reported from black hole candidates, the models are ruled out. The case for
identifying black hole candidates in X-ray binaries as true black holes is thus
strengthened.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, to appear in The Astrophysical Journa
System and market failures: the unavailability of magnesium sulphate for the treatment of eclampsia and pre-eclampsia in Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Low cost and effective drugs, such as magnesium sulphate, need to be included in initiatives to improve access to essential medicines in Afric
On the dimension of subspaces with bounded Schmidt rank
We consider the question of how large a subspace of a given bipartite quantum
system can be when the subspace contains only highly entangled states. This is
motivated in part by results of Hayden et al., which show that in large d x
d--dimensional systems there exist random subspaces of dimension almost d^2,
all of whose states have entropy of entanglement at least log d - O(1). It is
also related to results due to Parthasarathy on the dimension of completely
entangled subspaces, which have connections with the construction of
unextendible product bases. Here we take as entanglement measure the Schmidt
rank, and determine, for every pair of local dimensions dA and dB, and every r,
the largest dimension of a subspace consisting only of entangled states of
Schmidt rank r or larger. This exact answer is a significant improvement on the
best bounds that can be obtained using random subspace techniques. We also
determine the converse: the largest dimension of a subspace with an upper bound
on the Schmidt rank. Finally, we discuss the question of subspaces containing
only states with Schmidt equal to r.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX4 forma
Eddington-limited X-ray Bursts as Distance Indicators. I. Systematic Trends and Spherical Symmetry in Bursts from 4U 1728-34
We investigate the limitations of thermonuclear X-ray bursts as a distance
indicator for the weakly-magnetized accreting neutron star 4U 1728-34. We
measured the unabsorbed peak flux of 81 bursts in public data from the Rossi
X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE). The distribution of peak fluxes was bimodal: 66
bursts exhibited photospheric radius expansion and were distributed about a
mean bolometric flux of 9.2e-8 erg/cm^2/s, while the remaining (non-radius
expansion) bursts reached 4.5e-8 erg/cm^2/s, on average. The peak fluxes of the
radius-expansion bursts were not constant, exhibiting a standard deviation of
9.4% and a total variation of 46%. These bursts showed significant correlations
between their peak flux and the X-ray colors of the persistent emission
immediately prior to the burst. We also found evidence for quasi-periodic
variation of the peak fluxes of radius-expansion bursts, with a time scale of
approximately 40 d. The persistent flux observed with RXTE/ASM over 5.8 yr
exhibited quasi-periodic variability on a similar time scale. We suggest that
these variations may have a common origin in reflection from a warped accretion
disk. Once the systematic variation of the peak burst fluxes is subtracted, the
residual scatter is only approximately 3%, roughly consistent with the
measurement uncertainties. The narrowness of this distribution strongly
suggests that i) the radiation from the neutron star atmosphere during
radius-expansion episodes is nearly spherically symmetric, and ii) the
radius-expansion bursts reach a common peak flux which may be interpreted as a
standard candle intensity.Adopting the minimum peak flux for the
radius-expansion bursts as the Eddington flux limit, we derive a distance for
the source of 4.4-4.8 kpc.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted by ApJ. Minor referee's revisions, also
includes 9 newly public X-ray burst
- …