Dust from Comet 209P/LINEAR during its 2014 Return: Parent Body of a New Meteor Shower, the May Camelopardalids

We report a new observation of the Jupiter-family comet 209P/LINEAR during its 2014 return. The comet is recognized as a dust source of a new meteor shower, the May Camelopardalids. 209P/LINEAR was apparently inactive at a heliocentric distance rh = 1.6 au and showed weak activity at rh < 1.4 au. We found an active region of <0.001% of the entire nuclear surface during the comet's dormant phase. An edge-on image suggests that particles up to 1 cm in size (with an uncertainty of factor 3-5) were ejected following a differential power-law size distribution with index q=-3.25+-0.10. We derived a mass loss rate of 2-10 kg/s during the active phase and a total mass of ~5x10^7 kg during the 2014 return. The ejection terminal velocity of millimeter- to centimeter-sized particles was 1-4 m/s, which is comparable to the escape velocity from the nucleus (1.4 m/s). These results imply that such large meteoric particles marginally escaped from the highly dormant comet nucleus via the gas drag force only within a few months of the perihelion passage.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, accepted on 2014 December 11 for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letter

The Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline

In this paper, we describe the optical imaging data processing pipeline developed for the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) instrument. The HSC Pipeline builds on the prototype pipeline being developed by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's Data Management system, adding customizations for HSC, large-scale processing capabilities, and novel algorithms that have since been reincorporated into the LSST codebase. While designed primarily to reduce HSC Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) data, it is also the recommended pipeline for reducing general-observer HSC data. The HSC pipeline includes high level processing steps that generate coadded images and science-ready catalogs as well as low-level detrending and image characterizations.Comment: 39 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japa

Cosmology from cosmic shear power spectra with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first-year data

We measure cosmic weak lensing shear power spectra with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey first-year shear catalog covering 137deg$^2$ of the sky. Thanks to the high effective galaxy number density of $\sim$17 arcmin$^{-2}$ even after conservative cuts such as magnitude cut of $i<24.5$ and photometric redshift cut of $0.3\leq z \leq 1.5$, we obtain a high significance measurement of the cosmic shear power spectra in 4 tomographic redshift bins, achieving a total signal-to-noise ratio of 16 in the multipole range $300 \leq \ell \leq 1900$. We carefully account for various uncertainties in our analysis including the intrinsic alignment of galaxies, scatters and biases in photometric redshifts, residual uncertainties in the shear measurement, and modeling of the matter power spectrum. The accuracy of our power spectrum measurement method as well as our analytic model of the covariance matrix are tested against realistic mock shear catalogs. For a flat $\Lambda$ cold dark matter ($\Lambda$CDM) model, we find $S_8\equiv \sigma_8(\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^\alpha=0.800^{+0.029}_{-0.028}$ for $\alpha=0.45$ ($S_8=0.780^{+0.030}_{-0.033}$ for $\alpha=0.5$) from our HSC tomographic cosmic shear analysis alone. In comparison with Planck cosmic microwave background constraints, our results prefer slightly lower values of $S_8$, although metrics such as the Bayesian evidence ratio test do not show significant evidence for discordance between these results. We study the effect of possible additional systematic errors that are unaccounted in our fiducial cosmic shear analysis, and find that they can shift the best-fit values of $S_8$ by up to $\sim 0.6\sigma$ in both directions. The full HSC survey data will contain several times more area, and will lead to significantly improved cosmological constraints.Comment: 43 pages, 21 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

Towards HCP-Style macaque connectomes: 24-Channel 3T multi-array coil, MRI sequences and preprocessing

© 2020 The Author(s) Macaque monkeys are an important animal model where invasive investigations can lead to a better understanding of the cortical organization of primates including humans. However, the tools and methods for noninvasive image acquisition (e.g. MRI RF coils and pulse sequence protocols) and image data preprocessing have lagged behind those developed for humans. To resolve the structural and functional characteristics of the smaller macaque brain, high spatial, temporal, and angular resolutions combined with high signal-to-noise ratio are required to ensure good image quality. To address these challenges, we developed a macaque 24-channel receive coil for 3-T MRI with parallel imaging capabilities. This coil enables adaptation of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) image acquisition protocols to the in-vivo macaque brain. In addition, we adapted HCP preprocessing methods to the macaque brain, including spatial minimal preprocessing of structural, functional MRI (fMRI), and diffusion MRI (dMRI). The coil provides the necessary high signal-to-noise ratio and high efficiency in data acquisition, allowing four- and five-fold accelerations for dMRI and fMRI. Automated FreeSurfer segmentation of cortex, reconstruction of cortical surface, removal of artefacts and nuisance signals in fMRI, and distortion correction of dMRI all performed well, and the overall quality of basic neurobiological measures was comparable with those for the HCP. Analyses of functional connectivity in fMRI revealed high sensitivity as compared with those from publicly shared datasets. Tractography-based connectivity estimates correlated with tracer connectivity similarly to that achieved using ex-vivo dMRI. The resulting HCP-style in vivo macaque MRI data show considerable promise for analyzing cortical architecture and functional and structural connectivity using advanced methods that have previously only been available in studies of the human brain