2,538 research outputs found
Abundances in Stars from the Red Giant Branch Tip to the Near the Main Sequence in M71: I. Sample Selection, Observing Strategy and Stellar Parameters
We present the sample for an abundance analysis of 25 members of M71 with
luminosities ranging from the red giant branch tip to the upper main sequence.
The spectra are of high dispersion and of high precision. We describe the
observing strategy and determine the stellar parameters for the sample stars
using both broad band colors and fits of H profiles. The derived
stellar parameters agree with those from the Yale stellar evolutionary
tracks to within 50 -- 100K for a fixed log g, which is within the level of the
uncertainties.Comment: Minor changes to conform to version accepted for publication, with
several new figures (Paper 1 of a pair
The GOAL study: a prospective examination of the impact of factor V Leiden and ABO(H) blood groups on haemorrhagic and thrombotic pregnancy outcomes
Factor V Leiden (FVL) and ABO(H) blood groups are the common influences on haemostasis and retrospective studies have linked FVL with pregnancy complications. However, only one sizeable prospective examination has taken place. As a result, neither the impact of FVL in unselected subjects, any interaction with ABO(H) in pregnancy, nor the utility of screening for FVL is defined. A prospective study of 4250 unselected pregnancies was carried out. A venous thromboembolism (VTE) rate of 1·23/1000 was observed, but no significant association between FVL and pre-eclampsia, intra-uterine growth restriction or pregnancy loss was seen. No influence of FVL and/or ABO(H) on ante-natal bleeding or intra-partum or postpartum haemorrhage was observed. However, FVL was associated with birth-weights >90th centile [odds ratio (OR) 1·81; 95% confidence interval (CI<sub>95</sub>) 1·04â3·31] and neonatal death (OR 14·79; CI<sub>95</sub> 2·71â80·74). No association with ABO(H) alone, or any interaction between ABO(H) and FVL was observed. We neither confirmed the protective effect of FVL on pregnancy-related blood loss reported in previous smaller studies, nor did we find the increased risk of some vascular complications reported in retrospective studies
Convection, Thermal Bifurcation, and the Colors of A stars
Broad-band ultraviolet photometry from the TD-1 satellite and low dispersion
spectra from the short wavelength camera of IUE have been used to investigate a
long-standing proposal of Bohm-Vitense that the normal main sequence A- and
early-F stars may divide into two different temperature sequences: (1) a high
temperature branch (and plateau) comprised of slowly rotating convective stars,
and (2) a low temperature branch populated by rapidly rotating radiative stars.
We find no evidence from either dataset to support such a claim, or to confirm
the existence of an "A-star gap" in the B-V color range 0.22 <= B-V <= 0.28 due
to the sudden onset of convection. We do observe, nonetheless, a large scatter
in the 1800--2000 A colors of the A-F stars, which amounts to ~0.65 mags at a
given B-V color index. The scatter is not caused by interstellar or
circumstellar reddening. A convincing case can also be made against binarity
and intrinsic variability due to pulsations of delta Sct origin. We find no
correlation with established chromospheric and coronal proxies of convection,
and thus no demonstrable link to the possible onset of convection among the A-F
stars. The scatter is not instrumental. Approximately 0.4 mags of the scatter
is shown to arise from individual differences in surface gravity as well as a
moderate spread (factor of ~3) in heavy metal abundance and UV line blanketing.
A dispersion of ~0.25 mags remains, which has no clear and obvious explanation.
The most likely cause, we believe, is a residual imprecision in our correction
for the spread in metal abundances. However, the existing data do not rule out
possible contributions from intrinsic stellar variability or from differential
UV line blanketing effects owing to a dispersion in microturbulent velocity.Comment: 40 pages, 14 figures, 1 table, AAS LaTex, to appear in The
Astrophysical Journa
Mergers of close primordial binaries
We study the production of main sequence mergers of tidally-synchronized
primordial short-period binaries. The principal ingredients of our calculation
are the angular momentum loss rates inferred from the spindown of open cluster
stars and the distribution of binary properties in young open clusters. We
compare our results with the expected number of systems that experience mass
transfer in post-main sequence phases of evolution and compute the
uncertainties in the theoretical predictions. We estimate that main-sequence
mergers can account for the observed number of single blue stragglers in M67.
Applied to the blue straggler population, this implies that such mergers are
responsible for about one quarter of the population of halo blue metal poor
stars, and at least one third of the blue stragglers in open clusters for
systems older than 1 Gyr. The observed trends as a function of age are
consistent with a saturated angular momentum loss rate for rapidly rotating
tidally synchronized systems. The predicted number of blue stragglers from main
sequence mergers alone is comparable to the number observed in globular
clusters, indicating that the net effect of dynamical interactions in dense
stellar environments is to reduce rather than increase the blue straggler
population. A population of subturnoff mergers of order 3-4% of the upper main
sequence population is also predicted for stars older than 4 Gyr, which is
roughly comparable to the small population of highly Li-depleted halo dwarfs.
Other observational tests are discussed.Comment: number of pages depends on font, margins, columns etc (58 with given
format), 14 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journa
Functional neuroimaging effects of recently discovered genetic risk loci for schizophrenia and polygenic risk profile in five RDoC subdomains
Recently, 125 loci with genome-wide support for association with schizophrenia
were identified. We investigated the impact of these variants and their
accumulated genetic risk on brain activation in five neurocognitive domains of
the Research Domain Criteria (working memory, reward processing, episodic
memory, social cognition and emotion processing). In 578 healthy subjects we
tested for association (i) of a polygenic risk profile score (RPS) including
all single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) reaching genome-wide significance
in the recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) meta-analysis and (ii) of
all independent genome-wide significant loci separately that showed sufficient
distribution of all allelic groups in our sample (105 SNPs). The RPS was
nominally associated with perigenual anterior cingulate and posterior
cingulate/precuneus activation during episodic memory (PFWE(ROI)=0.047) and
social cognition (PFWE(ROI)=0.025), respectively. Single SNP analyses revealed
that rs9607782, located near EP300, was significantly associated with amygdala
recruitment during emotion processing (PFWE(ROI)=1.63 Ă 10â4, surpassing
Bonferroni correction for the number of SNPs). Importantly, this association
was replicable in an independent sample (N=150; PFWE(ROI)<0.025). Other SNP
effects previously associated with imaging phenotypes were nominally
significant, but did not withstand correction for the number of SNPs tested.
To assess whether there was true signal within our data, we repeated single
SNP analyses with 105 randomly chosen non-schizophrenia-associated variants,
observing fewer significant results and lower association probabilities.
Applying stringent methodological procedures, we found preliminary evidence
for the notion that genetic risk for schizophrenia conferred by rs9607782 may
be mediated by amygdala function. We critically evaluate the potential caveats
of the methodological approaches employed and offer suggestions for future
studies
A Consistency Test of Spectroscopic Gravities for Late-Type Stars
Chemical analyses of late-type stars are usually carried out following the
classical recipe: LTE line formation and homogeneous, plane-parallel,
flux-constant, and LTE model atmospheres. We review different results in the
literature that have suggested significant inconsistencies in the spectroscopic
analyses, pointing out the difficulties in deriving independent estimates of
the stellar fundamental parameters and hence,detecting systematic errors.
The trigonometric parallaxes measured by the HIPPARCOS mission provide
accurate appraisals of the stellar surface gravity for nearby stars, which are
used here to check the gravities obtained from the photospheric iron ionization
balance. We find an approximate agreement for stars in the metallicity range -1
<= [Fe/H] <= 0, but the comparison shows that the differences between the
spectroscopic and trigonometric gravities decrease towards lower metallicities
for more metal-deficient dwarfs (-2.5 <= [Fe/H] <= -1.0), which casts a shadow
upon the abundance analyses for extreme metal-poor stars that make use of the
ionization equilibrium to constrain the gravity. The comparison with the
strong-line gravities derived by Edvardsson (1988) and Fuhrmann (1998a)
confirms that this method provides systematically larger gravities than the
ionization balance. The strong-line gravities get closer to the physical ones
for the stars analyzed by Fuhrmann, but they are even further away than the
iron ionization gravities for the stars of lower gravities in Edvardsson's
sample. The confrontation of the deviations of the iron ionization gravities in
metal-poor stars reported here with departures from the excitation balance
found in the literature, show that they are likely to be induced by the same
physical mechanism(s).Comment: AAS LaTeX v4.0, 35 pages, 10 PostScript files; to appear in The
Astrophysical Journa
Reduction of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) leads to visual impairment in vertebrates
In vertebrates, mitochondria are tightly preserved energy producing organelles, which sustain nervous system development and function. The understanding of proteins that regulate their homoeostasis in complex animals is therefore critical and doing so via means of systemic analysis pivotal to inform pathophysiological conditions associated with mitochondrial deficiency. With the goal to decipher the role of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) in brain development, we employed the zebrafish as elected model reporting that the Atpif1aâ/â zebrafish mutant, pinotage (pnttq209), which lacks one of the two IF1 paralogous, exhibits visual impairment alongside increased apoptotic bodies and neuroinflammation in both brain and retina. This associates with increased processing of the dynamin-like GTPase optic atrophy 1 (OPA1), whose ablation is a direct cause of inherited optic atrophy. Defects in vision associated with the processing of OPA1 are specular in Atpif1â/â mice thus confirming a regulatory axis, which interlinks IF1 and OPA1 in the definition of mitochondrial fitness and specialised brain functions. This study unveils a functional relay between IF1 and OPA1 in central nervous system besides representing an example of how the zebrafish model could be harnessed to infer the activity of mitochondrial proteins during development
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